Have you guys considered merged mining at all? I know you literally just hard forked but I really think merged mining is going to be the future for many altcoins as its just far too hard to consolidate enough hash to properly secure a network. I also feel that if you got in early enough it would benefit Viacoin as being one of the pioneers of the tech. From what I know of btcdrak he certainly has the skills to pull it off and put viacoin in the spotlight.
I would not object to it. Competing for scrypt hash power is not ideal and reduces overall network security. Given the rise of scrypt ASICs now it means scrypt mining requires specialised hardware so having a decent share of the total available scrypt mining power will improve network security no end. We decided against launching with merged mining because bootstrapping is much more risky. Now viacoin is more established and we have several large pools that already mine via and also have merged mining support, means we could make a planned transition.
TLDR; Without merged mining, hash rate is directly proportional to price and dissipated across all coins competing for the same PoW. Competing for miners dilutes security. Once a PoW has ASICs then security is proportional to who owns what ASICs and you no longer need to worry about generic hardware (like botnets which in CPU PoW can easily gain 51%).
The next factor is scrypt ASICs do not provide orders of magnitude in efficiency as sha256 and therefore it's a lot less scary when things scale up from non-merged-mining to merged mining. It also means that once you have a decent hash rate it's harder to be attacked by other scrypt miners since the cost is non-trivial and the necessary hardware is always scarce.
We've seen two coins recently successfully fork to merged mining and are now at levels which would make it very difficult for an attack. Overall scrypt pools are a lot more diverse than bitcoin which has 2 or 3 major pools only which is less than ideal for merged mining security.
The major risk with merged mining applies to sidechains because there is a strong financial incentive to double spend the sidechain. But for non-sidechains, the risk is really more to do with bootstrapping during a period when there isnt much miner diversity and major hash rate is coming from one or two pools (and assuming they want to hurt the coin). While an attack by a malicious pool is free of cost it is infeasible if there is pool diversity because they dont have majority anyway. Compare that with sha256 where one pool maybe orders of magnitude more powerful than the entire non-merged mined network hashrate, and unless all major pools also merge mined, then that one pool would still have majority rule. Conversely with scrypt, pool diversity is greater and it is much harder, if not infeasible for one pool to maliciously attack a merged mined coin.
We can certainly experiment on testnet. I would like much more community discussion on the matter though.