.bit though does work for ordinary people who use http://www.opennicproject.org/

I set my home router to use OpenNic and instantly every computing device in my house was able to resolve .bit domains.

Namecoin doesn't widely advertise that because it isn't as secure to trust the opennic DNS servers. But OpenNic is the solution for everyday users.

If you do start this project, hopefully you talk with them to get your TLD to resolve through their project because it makes things easier.

I think the biggest issue for me with trust is the premine.

If you did the premine such that the coins would be distributed back to you slowly over time and that was in the code, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But there have been too many cases where the purpose of a premine is to pump the price and dump the premine for BTC.