To me the real problem with namecoin for the purpose stated in the title of this post is that it doesn't emphasize delegation to near the degree necessary to ac

To me the real problem with namecoin for the purpose stated in the title of this post is that it doesn't emphasize delegation to near the degree necessary to achieve it. The current implementation is much more like the older name system in that it requires the list of canonical names to be distributed as widely as possible. There is a reason the root nameservers only delegate the act of name lookup at the top level. It's just not practical for them to have a complete list, and it's not even particularly desirable for users of it to have their list of names completely public (think internal servers). It is possible to name a delegate nameserver through namecoin, I believe, but last I looked it was a bit iffy and it doesn't require any kind of authentication of results from the delegated nameserver a-la dnscurve.