Refreshing to read opinions of someone who actually has a clue instead of crypto noobs hyping their vapor buzzwords. I consider myself to be crypto noob as well, however:
What if the Darkcoin wallet was monitoring the state of the network, and if the running masternode count fell for example 50% in a short period of time, it would stop denominating funds (denomination is the anonymization process which runs in the background). This wouldn't affect people sending or receiving coins because they already have them denominated/anonymized. It would only prevent people from re-sending received funds during this ddos period.
Every other coin has to use nodes as well, and they can be ddos attacked which can halt the network for the duration of the attack. It's not only Darkcoin that is susceptible to ddos.
Masternodes do provide a nice easily identified target - I think some effort on testnet is needed at some point soon, maybe after RC4 release, to try and break testnet MNs with such attacks and figure out what we can implement to mitigate them, because we can't stop them.
I don't know a lot about it, maybe we have a white hat among us who can assist?