Astute. I designed a highly ASIC-resistent proof-of-work that is conceptually similar to Monero's (designed late 2013 so perhaps before them), and my design is apparently 100 - 1000x faster than Monero's and doesn't suffer from what I believe to be cryptographic error in the way Monero employed the AES-NI instructions.

The slow speed of Monero's (all Cryptonote coins') Pow hash is a serious problem. Perhaps it is mitigated by other factors, but I still think it could end up being a significant hindrance at some point in some way.

I would be willing to open source the work I did, if someone offered to pay me for the work I did on it. There is pseudo-code and a whitepaper which explains in great detail the relationship of the algorithm to the original Scrypt. As well I wrote some test code in Javascript to test some its properties (not speed of course). Much of it, some people already have thought about. But there are probably a few insights or organization that clarifies matters.

Also, it employs a 4096-bit (512B) hash that is similar to the Salsa that Scrypt uses which employs AVX2 to be very fast (which I believe might also make it GPU resistant but I didn't test this), and this is what makes mine so much faster. I did write down the assembly language for this hash.

This AVX2 would defeat botnets almost entirely (near-term which is when it is important concern any way), because AVX2 doesn't work on pre-Haswell nor on earlier versions of operating systems.

I think open sourcing this would help Monero look at their options for improving their hash.

But do note that neither Monero nor my hash will be ASIC proof. Given enough monetary incentive it can be made more efficient on an ASIC.

And I've argued that a complex Pow algorithm that can eventually be made more efficient on an ASIC is actually an inferior strategy (long-term) than one that tries to get ASICs to be ubiquitous as early as possible. The reason being that less vendors may be able to produce this very complex ASIC and lockup the market. However, Monero could use such a complex algorithm for the medium-term if they were sure they could change as necessary.