I don't think NXT is dying. They have a good, enthusiatic team. And I think they are well funded. They are a major sponsor in the upcoming Payment Expo.
A decent development team is about all they have going for them.
Which is actually the most important thing when it's only over a year old. These are just the beginnings.
Developing features, interconnecting features, slowly improving usability, ironing out bugs, etc.
Waning user adoption and interest, lack of merchant acceptance, lack of VC investment and legitimate business interest.
Not too important at the moment. There are plenty of (techie) users in NXT/SuperNET slack and fora. NXT is not primarily used for payments, so there's no real need for merchants accepting NXT. Leave that to BTC for the time being. VC's have trouble investing in decentralized community based opensource platforms, NXT is more like the Linux of crypto. Besides, VC's want to extract profits after a certain point of time, imo VC money is overrated and not always needed. There are some businesses using NXT (technology) by the way. Like smartcontracts.com, debune.org, and jetcoininstitute.com. And NXT is crypto sponsor of payexpo.com (not a crypto conference).
Part of NxTs problem deals with not having first mover advantage and another part of it is its tainted and questionable ICO. Bitcoin has enough problems with Satoshi being anonymous and possibly controlling between 2- 5% of all Bitcoins that will ever be mined but at least it was a fair POW distribution where anyone can mine. It is very likely (based upon the evidence) that between 5-9 users control most of the stake with NxT which is very troubling and why most people are apprehensive about getting involved with NxT.
But it does have first mover advantage. The first 100% PoS coin (no bitcoin clone), the first with a functioning Asset Exchange, decentralized Marketplace, Monetary System, etc. ICO is only 'questionable' in the eyes of miners that are angry they couldn't mine the shit out of it. Actually, there are some disadvantages if distribution is too even and there are no whales. There's less innovation, less sponsors, etc, mentioned in the NEM discussion iirc.
This will continue haunt them just like Paycoin, Dash, Maidsafecoin and many other coins that didn't have a fair launch.
There's no such thing as a 'fair' launch. Is 1000 people fair? Is 10000 people fair? How about 5 billion people?