Dash is not in competition with Monero, which is not a cryptocurrency, was not designed as a cryptocurrency and is unlikely to ever perform a cryptocurrency role other than as a minority speculative asset (as it is does right now).
Monero (or the original design specification that characterises cryptonote's behaviour) is a cryptographic record keeping system designed to track money in a bank. What some fly developer decided to do (wittingly or unwittingly) is lift the template for the record keeping system, ditch the bank and try to get away with calling the residual cryptographic transport mechanism "money".
The Nature of Money is Not Obscurity
Contrary to what a lot of cryptographic programmers come-self-appointed-monetary-analysts assert, privacy (in the sense of hiding transactions) is not an integral part of any "money like good". It is the domain of record keeping for such.
Metals, Coal and even Paper cash do not have privacy "buit into them". They have fungibility which supports anonymity amongst its holders. The records that track the transactions for such "money like goods" are private and may (as in the case of bank accounts) in fact be referred to as 'money' but they are not the money, they are just the records.
Obscurity - A Bookkeeping Concept
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is no intermediate counterparty holding records on your behalf. (If there was, a system like cryptonote might still be of some use). Cryptocurrency therefore re-orders the priorities of monetary transparency and record keeping privacy such that latter becomes the domain of the holder and not the monetary media itself. This is what allows bitcoin to be defined as base money as opposed to a mere record keeping system.
Anonymity - A "Visible Cash" Concept
What IS important in cryptocurrency, however, is fungibility - as everyone keeps raging about. Improving fungibility enhances the performance of any money-like-good as a cash medium. Coal is pretty fungible. You could watch a shipment of coal arrive at the port without reasonably distinguishing it from any other shipment. But you wouldn't improve the fungibility by hiding the shipment altogether - you'd simply be sowing doubt about the its existence and destroying coal's suitability as a monetary medium.
Dash does not try to do this. It is possibly the only cryptocurrency project right now that has all the design priorities of blockchain-based money in the right balance.
Who Has the Right Design Goals ?
Dash hasn't thrown the baby out with the bathwater like sidechains does (by ruining bitcoin's fungibility and mobility - two fundamental properties of good money) or by reverting the blockchain back to a mere bookkeeping system as cryptonote does. Instead of such car crash, ill thought through sledghammer approaches, it adds a little bit of salt, in a minimally invasive way to the existing bitcoin architecture while extracting huge gains from the result. In other words, it doesn't hide the coal shipments, it just makes the piles of coal less 'lumpy' and perfectly fungible.
Peter Todd may have had a weak technical case if Dash and Monero had been trying to solve the same problem. They are not. Cryptonote is solving the wrong problem - one that's associated with its original role as a record keeping system. You can't just take a cryptographic banking system, throw away the bank and call it money. (You can fool some of the people...).
Dash, on the other hand, is addressing a genuine monetary property - i.e. solving the "right problem" without adversely impacting any other characteristic of bitcoin's almost-perfect design.
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