Hi bobster, you are right that technical innovation is really hard to evaluate objectively and fairly, but that is precisely one of, if not the most important factors which in combination with a strong community and a great dev team would predict or at least be strongly correlated with long term coin success.

For all practical purposes it is almost impossible to predict on a short term basis what a coin will do, but for a long term basis there are few really important things to judge and a lot of secondary ones. As you may know, there's always this power law distribution that seems to govern these kind of situations. So you should try to create create a ranking formula that should emulate reality as close as possible.(There are typically 2-3 factors that are responsible for 80%-90% of the long term outcome and lots of secondary, negligible factors responsible for 10%-20%) Since on the short term this is almost impossible because of the randomness and highly unpredictable events that occur you should focus on long term predictability. This is best done by trying to ignore the noise of the many secondary factors and make sure you don't miss any of the 2-3 very important ones. After you have the important ones and 80%-90% of the long term picture you can slowly add more secondary ones, but that should be the order.

We are just reading the statistics of Darkcoin available from their official Github open-source code repository here:
https://github.com/darkcoinproject/darkcoin
Not many other developers Watching or Starring this repo compared to Dogecoin.

We are aware that Darkcoin is the first fully anonymous coin. We are working on capturing data on these Technical Innovation on CoinGecko soon.
Thanks for the feedback

We agree that we need to prioritize Quality over Quantity. We are still fairly new and actively pushing updates to improve our methodology.
Btw how do you find out there are over 300 Darkcoin copy/scam coins? Might be a good indicator for us to use.