1.0 isnt going to be some magical fix.
Back last winter, we had been told that there were fiat onramps and corresponding marketing campaign coming, and that these were just waiting on a 1.0 release. That has since been revealed to be not true at all, and was likely just a cover by Brian Page for why he didnt accomplish anything. ("Oh yeah, I'm totally working on things! As soon as you guys get 1.0 released its ready to launch").
So don't expect 1.0 to do anything magical to the price. Moonstone might do some good however.
Contrary to what some people believe now I think that 1.0 (though a true 1.0!) is important for market adoption. Potential gateways are hesitant to integrate with unproven software which handles some sort of value exchange. Bitcoin only got away with it because its user base grew faster than the code quality.
As for Moonstone, we think of Bitshares as the potential combined order book and price discovery mechanism for tons of assets which could be issued in the near future via gateways (primarily stocks and bonds, secondarily fiat IOUs). BitAssets, the one feature the core team is currently pushing, won't be in our opinion the main driving factor for some time to come. That is because bitAssets have a chicken and egg problem: They need high liquidity to attract liquidity.
However, IOUs/UIAs don't have that problem and it is obvious that there is a huge unmet market out there of people and companies who want to have a combined, automated, and secure order book like that. This is why we position Moonstone not primarily as a bitAsset wallet but as a wallet where you can manage your IOUs/UIAs.
In the mid-to-long term Moonstone will hopefully start supporting the Bitshares market value by providing the on-blockchain ID verification for third party gateways. That way you can easily sign up to gateways around the world and trade all kinds of stocks/bonds legally. This is definitely part of our plan for 2015.