I'd love to hear suggestions on how we could do a better job on this.
Perhaps, some additional work on the features of the coin, that would appeal to the greater audience. If there is no displeasure with the idea of the more "financial" coin.
I don't see much reason to try to compete with Bitcoin, if that's what you mean by "financial". Bitcoin already works extremely well at what it does. Remember the Unix philosophy.
a) Some work on the features enabling greater swiftness of the transactions (segwit, lightninings, the like). Regular info updates on this work.
We recently activated CLTV; up next in the consensus fork department is AAA, then CSV, and then I think we'll activate SegWit. That said, we pretty much always follow what Bitcoin does, so if by some chance SegWit is still being held up in Bitcoin, I think it's somewhat unlikely that we'll try to activate before Bitcoin.
I really like Lightning, and we have some plans where Lightning will be highly useful.
b) Clearly, visibly, outlined emphasis on those privacy/security features, which differentiate the n. from the other coins, or put it in the same league with the more advanced ones (in terms of privacy, security)
Privacy/security is a strong focus for me at the moment. On the privacy front, while I was in London for QCon last month, I met up with Riccardo Spagni from Monero to discuss collaboration plans; I'm also engaging with the Tor people. On the security front, one of the use cases that we're really pushing is TLS... hopefully an announcement will be made soon on this front.
c) It appears that at the moment namecoin mostly covers the narrow field: "bit" domains, etc. So, some additional emphasis can be made on the other things, and the website design can embody this (more simple finance-oriented sections separated from the more specialized bit/dns-oriented sections).
See my above comment on the Unix philosophy. There are lots of blockchains that specialize in being a currency (mainly Bitcoin); we specialize in naming. That said, I see plenty of room for diversification into identity-related applications. Daniel Kraft's NameID is a really cool proof of concept; I have some ideas on how it could be improved. There are several other use case ideas that have been thrown around, and just no one has had a chance to work on them yet.
I am not sure, though, if my ideas make any sense, and are not just a waste of time and efforts for the devs.
No worries.
