I am riding high with DRK. It is the only coin that I know of where the dev is committed to the addition of important new features over time, eschewing the "no-hard-forks" "stability" that most devs try to enforce. Most devs act as "hands-off gods" who code their coin, release it into the wild and subsequently only make critical security upgrades when necessary. The idea of a coin whose very ideas are not set in stone, is in itself unique. (In theory, Bitcoin and others allow for continued development, but their pace of development is laughably slow.... by the time Bitcoin implements a new feature, it will have existed in an altcoin for months if not years.)
The idea of "Masternodes" who earn 10% of all mined coins, and which act as coin-mixers, and which must be seeded with 1000 DRK (locked while the Masternode is running) is actually kind of similar to the "Trustees" in dPoS. The 1000 DRK requirement has also created a positive feedback loop where the coins are effectively removed from the market, driving the price up, which in turn makes the Masternodes more profitable because they earn new coins daily without mining.
The anonymity features are also great, of course, and what everybody is excited about right now. But I will say that I am at least as excited by the developer's competence and commitment to continued active development as I am by any of the existing features. It is not the typical "release new version only when flaws are found" coin. I fully expect DRK to implement some Bitcoin-2.0 features within a year (after all the anonymity features have been fully implemented). AFAIK, Counterparty could be easily adapted to work on top of DRK, and I don't see any reason why it couldn't be fully supported by DRK itself (as opposed to the sometimes oppositional relationship between XCP and BTC devs).