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Darkcoin suffers from a bad methodology to achieve anonymity and it's put everything into this one basket.
Sorry to hear you lost faith in the project. Also, sorry you're going to be getting out at a horrible time (right before I announce I have EVERYTHING figured out to make Darkcoin mainstream?).
Over the past couple of days, I've made huge leaps in the Darksend technology. In fact, RC4 will be the final solution to Darkcoin's anonymity. The client will automatically look at all of your funds and it will be able to tell which funds are not anonymized, if it finds non-anonymous outputs it will run them through a darksend with other clients.
After that process, users can send without Darksend using the anonymous outputs for instant transactions without waiting for other nodes (with no upper limit on transaction sizes). The other thing you're missing is that there is a reason I forked Bitcoin. Adoption for Darkcoin will be MUCH faster and easier for vendors, because all of the APIs are the same.
Expect more news in a few days. I have lots of work to do, but soon we can start testing all of this new functionality.
This seems great at first blush, but won't there will be an issue with Darksend transaction liquidity over time? I mean, all transactions should be Darksent even if they don't need it so that there is the highest Darksend related activity on the blockchain. You want to maximize those confusing redenominated transactions flying around to make things as foggy as possible. Enabling a one-time sterilization process is bad because it makes it harder from a liquidity perspective for other (especially larger) transactions to be anonymized. The proposed RC4 diagrams from a few days back (i.e. two stage masternode transactions) seemed dialed in just right. Am I missing something?