Without masternodes there is no anonymity. The only coins that are provably anon (and by this I mean coins that are somewhat more anon than bitcoin) at this point are XMR and DRK. Every other coin is just a lot of promises. XMR has got a lot of barriers to adoption that I won't rehash here -- and DRK uses masternodes. 

If there are no masternode payments then there are only a handful of masternodes and the only thing that makes this coin valuable, decentralized anon, is near worthless. So miners saying that they don't like masternode payments = saying that they really want to mine a worthless coin.

Stupidity at its finest.