We don't see PLAY or MUSIC having their own version of bitUSD. In fact, you see them using the BitShares version.
I haven't been following Play lately, but who says they, especially Music, aren't/won't be using their own version of BitUSD? The Music blockchain isn't ready yet, so how can you make that claim? Unless there is some huge news I somehow missed, I am sure Music will have its own version of BitUSD.
I see no reason why this would not have been the case with Vote and DNS. In fact, I think it would have left it open for the market to fairly value each separate chain AND the service it planned to provide. You also would have had people like Toast working on DNS and bringing in a team of people very passionate about one thing: Decentralized DNS. That DAC would have funded the building of Decentralized DNS DACs that easily plug into future BitShares browsers, wallets, apps...etc. Each would have drawn in different demographics and then as they all grew, they could start implementing feature sets employed in other DACs. And each chain would have its own marketing delegates with their own focused message.
Yeah that's great except they all need a stable foundation blockchain to build on and also all either need or greatly benefit from the BitAsset system as well. Bidding on domain names isn't that great when you have to account for the price volatility of your DNS token over the 30 day bid period, for example. Using BitUSD would be better. Music lovers would rather pay 99 cents for a song rather than 1500 NOTE today but then 1800 NOTE tomorrow, for example. Great so they can each have their own BitAssets except now they split liquidity across many chains making each of the BitAssets worse than they would be if they were all on the same chain.
Okay, so let's have them all use the same BitAsset as the one on the BitShares X chain. Well this is a technically tricky but doable with some trade-offs. I have discussed a way this could be done in the past and have since become a stronger and stronger advocate of this approach. But even then, it takes lots of coding and testing before such functionality would be available for use. So then core devs need to work on that. But that work is reusable on all other blockchains, so it would make the most sense for the BitShares X devs to work on that and then when it is done all the other chains can adopt that technology. And their chains aren't really 1.0 ready until that feature is ready. They can work on the other business logic of the chain in parallel though if they can get the funding to do so.
So now you have BitShares X devs working on improving the foundations of the blockchain and BitAsset system. They are improving the performance, eliminating bugs, improving the market engine, and developing the new features needed to allow other chains to use BTSX's BitAssets. How long would this take and what resources would it require? Well we know at least how long it would take all of our core devs working on all but the last thing. That is because that is exactly what they are working on right now and they are still not done. It all took WAY longer than originally promised. That's what happens in software development. Also, it basically took all of the money I3 had raised (in fact, with all the price drops, how much longer do the core devs have before their year-end bonuses aren't enough to even pay them an unsustainably low wage for their services?) and some small additional money from delegate dilution pay.
Would there be enough money available to allow them to finish that task much less any extra to devote to OTHER devs working on VOTE and DNS functionality in parallel? Where would that money come from? Crowdfunding similar DPOS blockchain related projects would likely just be taking away buy pressure from BTSX, which would reduce the delegate dilution pay for the core devs working on the foundation of the blockchain. We are a small group and not growing fast enough. But to grow fast enough we need a compelling product to sell to others who haven't bought into the vision yet. That means going after the really high value services and providing those services in a very high quality way. A decentralized exchange on a very robust platform with a fast lightweight client that looks beautiful and is easy to use is what is required. This is part of the foundation that other DACs depend on. It makes no sense to waste limited resources (money and dev talent) on things that are not going to grow the token's value fast enough. We need the token value to grow because that is the source of revenue to pay for more devs who will then be able to work on many interesting different blockchain services and features in parallel.
So the way I see it, the economics of the situation would have forced DNS and VOTE to languish anyway until enough of the BitShares X foundation was built. What is worse is that they would have avoided paying for the cost of the foundation that they use since the dilution would have been for BTSX only and not of the other DACs' tokens. I think the BitShares ecosystem would have not looked very differently in terms of functionality available or user adoption at this point in time, and I would even say we would have most likely been worse off than we currently are.
At this point, I think we just need to finish getting the core blockchain technology and the client software polished to get user adoption to increase and hopefully have the price of BTS increase, and then use those extra resources paid for through delegate dilution of the higher BTS price to build the functionality necessary to allow third-parties to concurrently build DApps and/or child DACs on the BitShares platform with minimal effort while using BTS's BitAssets and even leveraging the consensus/networking systems of the BTS blockchain (basically "Turing complete scripts" but done by allowing the validators or "child DAC delegates" to run arbitrary sandboxed executable code that implements the business logic of their DAC/DApp and uses the BTS blockchain and optionally their own nested blockchains, which are committed to the BTS parent blockchain, as the persistent data store for their DAC/DApp). Once this foundation is set, my hope is that we can have developer resources explode and see many third-parties concurrently working on new features like prediction markets, bond markets, voting, DNS, etc.