But having a DarkSend dev team on our side is a great advantage. Another advantage would be if somebody created a some marketplace or provide services for DRK, which would make it backed by some real economy. But maybe some already exist, I do not follow all the news. Also DarkCoin already managed to create some community around it, which many clonecoins struggle with. The larger the community is, higher the chance that the coin will not be lost among its clones.
If DarkSend is out, very soon will also come out some clonecoin with aggressive marketing. Therefore at that time Darkcoin must be widely known among cryptocoin public so we definitely need some marketing.
However at this point all what's DRK standing on is promise of DarkSend. Therefore many speculators are holding or buying. However DarkSend is still in the very early stage of development and there is still a chance that there is some undiscovered fundamental flaw in design that cannot be easily fixed.
You forgot the major point that Darkcoin without Darksend is a Quarkcoin clone without the instamine. So has a lot going for it as a CPU-minable-friendly coin as well as Darksend. Yes GPU's are a lot more efficient, but not by as bigger factor as Scrypt is. Whether this helps attract more low level miners to boost the economy or whether it just helps to attract botnets more to pump-and-dump we can only wait and see.
I see where you could say it's similar to Quark . . but I don't see luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd or echo in Quark. Also, a different block reward, difficulty and generation time puts this far enough away from Quark that I'd say it's not a clone.
