It still is one of the most important coins. But I think in terms of privacy coins, Monero is always the Bitcoin of them all. For me,,, I remember reading about DASH and how it was shady in the sense of developers doing somethings people were not happy with (centralized, so for a privacy coin, unacceptable).
It is for sure undervalued, remember when it was over $1k, but then, so was Ethereum!
Monero was dangerously traceable the first few years (
https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/), which basicly means that Dash won the privacy race ages ago.
Dash then moved on to developing additional use cases, moving away from being a privacy-centric cryptocurrency towards a cryptocurrency more focussed on
providing fast and cheap transactions, locked against double spending. As a bonus you still have the option to put privacy on your transactions.
With Dash Evolution more use cases will become available, things like decentralized apps, blockchain storage, privatesend on phones, etc.
With regards to the shady thing, well that is best explained here :
https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OC/pages/19759164/Dash+Instamine+Issue+ClarificationIts up to investors to decide if this still plays a role, the community has moved on a long time ago and devs kept things well documented and visible for newcomers through the use of pinned topic
(
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/official-dash-instamine-issue-clarification.7569/).
Also with Dash you get a lot of transparancy in the form of quarterly summary calls, which are live streamed and provide a summary of its dev team's business development, financial state,
marketing development, roadmap progress etc. Not many crypto projects dev teams have this much transparancy towards their own community.
Link :
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/dash-core-group-q4-2018-summary-call-7-february-2019.43354/