Or the opposite (less miners less network safety). I'm not entirely sure how merged mining operates, but if its simply one mining client doing the same hashing and applying it to multiple coins/pools, then DRK could benefit from merged mining with other X11 coins.
DRK can secure its network far better in this way because the inverse rewards with the increased diff create an artificial barrier for network hashrate that will probably not exceed the 20ghash rate for quite a while. But merged mining with other X11 will bypass this issue and secure DRK well.
DRK miners would probably love to increase their profitability by mining DRK + getting all the extra revenue from DRK clones. If several scrypt coins go the merged mining route, profitability for X11 could come under threat without a merged miner of our own that can be provided as an alternative. I mean if someone can mine, say, 15 scrypt coins with one miner, why would he mine DRK? It wouldn't make sense unless he has a CPU.
What I'm saying should be valid unless there is some kind of technical obstacle that I am unaware off. Perhaps those with Bitcoin merged-mining experience can shed some light.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree with anything you just said, but it is important to keep in mind in things tend to be in some sort of equilibrium, whereby if the profitability of scrypt went up by that much, darkcoin miners would switch, difficulty level would fall, darkcoin profitability would rise again.
However the same equilibrium would be reached with less miners, less hash rate, and a less secure network. So while in the end it wouldn't be profitability that would suffer, it would be network hash rate and security.
