I do see CounterParty as being the most appropriate fit for Patrick's visions. Judging by his comments and wiki commits he seems to notice the numerous measurable benefits the platform offers over the competition.
As PhantomPhreak pointed out the CounterParty team also set a standard as the first major Bitcoin 2.0 project to have had any formal, comprensive, expert security audits of its codebase.
The first CounterParty audit was undertaken by respected Bitcoin Security researcher, and professional cryptographer with 8 Bitcoin CVE's under his belt.
Sergio Demian Lerner Who had this to say:
Keeping the counterparty source code small and independent of the network client is a great design decision, from the point of view of security. Because of this Counterparty client is the smallest, readable and yet completely usable alt-coin Ive ever seen.
The second audit was recently undertaken by Peter Todd, once again no significant security issues were found. Improvements/enhancements recommended by him are publicly listed on github for anyones perusal and discussion about their implementation
Open issues pertinent to that audit hereThis is a great approach, and Monero seems to be doing well to follow.