What I don't understand is all the time spent on trying to convince people that Dash is not up to the job. Huge amounts of time, just wasted.
The direct approach would be to break Dash and say: See, broke it. Told ya. Move on. Nothing more to see here.
I don't believe Darksend and InstantX evolution is finished yet. A lot of improvements can still be done to Darksend especially. For example adding CCT would open up a lot of optimization and improvement possibilities.
If CCT and masternode blinding were implemented, we could do with lesser rounds of mixing (and faster as the denomination sizes don't have to match), and for example perhaps with clever use of contracts a user could just fire-and-forget Darksend non-anonymized coins and the masternode network would keep the mixing process alive until the coins are mixed after which broadcasting the actual transaction.
The blockchain funding might attract more development talent to make such improvements possible.
Totally, the user oriented features like InstantX and Darksend, will continue to evolve and be improved upon there is a clear roadmap for that. The end user oriented features are the ones that are always more publicized and discussed.
But there is a more fundamental layer, that was the main focus of v12, that is crucial for the long term viability of the project, and it includes network infrastructure, funding, decision making, volunteering etc. Many projects ignore these fundamental aspects that answer questions like:
1. How are we going to build a large network of full nodes?
2. How are we going to keep developers, active team members, volunteers, community members and users engaged long term?
3. How are we going to take decisions on direction as a group in an orderly way?
4. How are we going to fund development, promotion and public awareness of the project?
5. How are we going to keep mining inclusive and interesting for GPU mining hobbyist?
All these aspects are not really end user oriented but are the base upon which the whole project is built and what guarantees that we will have the means to continue improving our added value features and user friendliness. By v12 Dash has implemented a proposed solution for all of these fundamental things, it will still take a few months for the new governance system to mature, among other things, but Dash is facing critical issues and being assertive in approaching them in an original way. That is what keeps investors and supporters engaged, Dash is moving forward with intention. The removal of the reference node for payments is a really important milestone that many said could not be done.
The next step after v12 is going back to work on our end user oriented features, improving Darksend, InstantX, mobile wallets and adding new functionality. Also as a community we will need some time to learn and adapt to all the new things that are coming with v12. We will also start to educate the public more about what we are doing.
About trolling and smearing in the context of this forum, that is just the ugly part of an anonymous internet forum, but no project with substance will fail or succeed from forum discussion whether positive or negative. It is easy to feel like a lot of people know about the altcoin projects from spending time here, reality is there is almost no awareness about the scene outside of this place and it's our responsibility to change that.
We should measure our progress in terms of real world awareness of the project which is still very limited but is a high priority for the team and the community. Creating and distributing more material about the technology and collaborating with the media to inform the public about Dash will be one of the main objectives we would like to pursue over the next year.