If in fact DRK had been adopted as the anonymous king then it would have failed miserably as soon as the Gov wanted it to and it would have become worthless in one fell swoop
I don't agree with this point of view at all.
Mixing is a far more optimal approach for a cryptocurrency to take right now. I for one am in this coin BECAUSE of the anonymity approach, not in spite of it. I think that once you've got a reliable, practical approach to anonymity, other priorities become far more important than trying to achieve a theoretical level of invulnerability.
The reasons I think that are threefold:
[1] - if an adversary with limitless resources wanted to usurp your currency, there are far more exposed "flanks' to attack than de-anonymising the odd transaction
[2] - the mixing approach has the option of multiple redundancy built into it. i.e. you can send it through multiple rounds. Add to that the fact that successive wallets are continuously anonymising the money supply and this blows away any theoretical comparison between "cryptography" and "mixing" at the level of a single transaction. Holistically, the approach we have is far more optimal IMO
[3] - the price you pay for a theoretical level of security is far too high and will simply kill the coin. Also, it can never be demonstrated as being more reliable anyway since both approaches are unbreakable to any significant extent at a practical level
... 