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.
XMR doesn't implement centralized mixing nodes... it uses ring signatures. As for your 'barriers to adoption' - who cares... it still makes DRK significantly inferior.
Most miners are just dumping what they mine almost immediately at this point anyway.
FUD
Who cares if they don't update? With RC4, all non paying blocks will be rejected. So pay or don't get any coins when you mine.
Unless enough people don't update, then we'll just end up with two forks. Yay... more DRK forking in the near future.