Most of the comments here are here to massage egos rather than think rationally about each currency.
DOGE hashrate, LTC hashrate both equal one thing: blockchain security. it doesn't make a difference whether people mine one or the other.
regardless of what DOGE thinks of LTC, or LTC thinks of DOGE both currencies are stronger if they merge.
Charles Lee made a proposal to the main DOGE dev. He declined to do mergemine. lol
I know. this shows the DOGE dev doesn't appreciate the long term benefits to DOGE, esp. when most of the mining will be complete in 8 months. merge mining is a win-win, not a marginalisation of one coin for another. it sounds more like a pissing contest rather than seriously considering the blockchain and network hashrate.
all of the paranoid talk about LTC miners dumping DOGE are overstated: 100 billion doge will be fully mined by jan 2015, so there really isn't that much time left to mine/dump a lot of doge. the developers of doge should be planning a transition in the doge mining economy when mining transitions from coin production to purely transaction fees.
it will be interesting how doge plans to incentivise miners to secure the blockchain after 100b doge is done. there is a marginal inflation rate, but there aren't enough coins at current prices to justify all that hashrate for 5b coins/year. asics will get better, and currency will fluctuate so who knows what the cost-benefit will look like in a year. but the one thing we do know is simply merge mining doesn't turn DOGE into LTC's bitch.