Our biggest takeaway from this is their community went quiet. As U said, NOT a good sign.

If the biggest thing going on in Dnotes-land is they are releasing Dnotes 2.0 which U can swap for Dnotes 1.0 and the new features are.... wait.... what are the new cool features again?

Here's a much shorter assessment of the value of Dnotes, one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies of 2018:
https://steemit.com/dnotes/@harpooninvestor/dnotes-a-cryptocurrency-bucking-the-down-trend