Mining can get, quite boring

He/ they are not in China and he/they were never in Afghanistan.

He /they were, likely still are, stationed and/or living in the Philippines.

A reallocation of the block reward is not the same thing as a tax. Economic forces ensure there is ALWAYS an equilibrium level of hash power that will be reached given a certain reward level. If the reward going to miners is 45% of the block reward, a certain amount of hashpower will result that covers the miners costs plus some market-defined level of expected return on capital. If the allocation to miners were increased to say 90% instead of 45% (just picking numbers to make the math easy), mining would become incredibly profitable at the current 45%-equilibrium hashrate and you would see a resulting rush of new investment in ASICs and buildings to house them and electricity to run them... in the end you would end up at a new equilibrium hash rate that was roughly 2x the current level, resulting in some tiny amount of incremental transactional security (e.g., from 99.999% secure to 99.9995% secure after 3 confirmations or something). EDIT: BUT, the expected economic return to the miners would be the same either way... at 90% you simply get twice as much hashrate as you would at 45%. It's simply a question of "how much hashrate should the network buy in order to ensure the desired level of transactional security?"

The beauty of this system is that the network can allocate resources towards activities other than mining... activities that provide more benefit than some insignificant amount of transactional security. For example, funding a code review, testers, or security-related bounties could improve security even more than more hash rate. Or more development resources might find some new way to secure transactions altogether, like InstantSend does. Or funding masternodes might strengthen the number of full nodes on the network and ensures they are professionally hosted. And these are all things that can improve security.

Now start thinking about all the other things that can be funded like marketing, research, business partnerships, integrations, work tools, development software, public relations... the list goes on. All of which provide benefits. Bitcoin's model (and virtually all coins) in which 100% of every block is directed toward only the need of transactional security (and worse, toward only one of many potential approaches to achieving that) is nothing short of stupidity. Even Satoshi recognized the needs for incentivized nodes, for example.

An analogy is imagine a world in which Visa (the first and largest credit card network for several years now) took all of its revenue and directed it ALL at transactional security. They bought the best firewalls, hired security experts, built their own private internet, hired armed guards to surround their datacenter, and generally went NUTS with anything security related. Sure, the network was really slow, it got saturated with transactions during peak periods, it wasn't very user friendly, and they didn't offer support. In order to pay a merchant, consumers had to learn how to use a long cryptographic "public key" that looked like a bunch of gibberish to your average Joe. But the network generally worked better than checks and was accepted at quite a few places and was SUPER secure. Meanwhile, they had no marketing, no PR, no business development, no sales force, no new services being developed, no customer service, and no legal department. Instead, they set up the Visa Foundation to handle that and asked the merchants and payment processors and end users to donate toward those things or perhaps do it on their behalf. Of course, the foundation was usually broke or close to it, so unfortunately, it wasn't that effective.

Meanwhile, a few years after Visa got started, a rival to Visa emerged called Mastercard. Mastercard started out pretty small, wasn't accepted anywhere and didn't have very many cardholders. But it did something Visa wasn't set up to do... it funded ALL its needs. They had a sales department, marketing department, legal department, customer service call center (once they had enough users), etc. They started rolling out new services like speedy transactions, increased transaction capacity, developed entirely new ways to secure transactions, made their product super user friendly, added a rewards program, and (gasp!) actually HELPED merchants get set up on the platform.

Naysayers of Mastercard pointed out how "insecure" their network was. They laughed that it wasn't accepted anywhere. They ridiculed that no one used it for much. They pointed out how puny their marketing budget was. Many, dubbed "Visa-maximalists" even scoffed at the idea that there could be more than one credit card payment network... after all, surely the confusion of TWO payment networks would only confuse customers and slow the adoption of this amazing new technology! And the idea that they want to PAY their developers directly and NOT through a donation-driven foundation? What are those guys over at Mastercard smoking anyways?!?!

Which network do you think survives in this scenario long term? Which one will be forced to adapt or will inevitably fail? In hindsight, it will be blindingly obvious which network should have won all along and how stupid Visa's approach was. When you put the scenario we live in RIGHT NOW in terms of two credit card networks, it suddenly becomes obvious what the better approach for a payment network is, and which project will win and which will fail (or be forced into adaptation). But for some reason, people have their blinders on simply because the underlying technology is different. Why!?!? I don't get how the digital currency world has not woken up to this fact yet.

Give us a few years, then come back and tell us whether we were the "dumbasses".

You are making an intuitive leap here that is inaccurate. Dash is a self-funding DAO, and a portion of the block rewards are allocated to fund budget proposals. Among these proposals are funding to hire developers, establish bounties, and issue deliverable-based contracts. The development happening now is directed toward Evolution, integrations, etc. This is what the above comment was referencing. Exactly zero Dash of the development proposals have been paid to Mr. Duffield, and he certainly isn't begging to anyone.

im ready for $80 as stable price range   

Im betting $10-$15 new stable range post d10e.

Then as dev ramps up and more services come onboard $15-$30 by years end.

Evolution release next year $40-$80