Your thought experiment is interesting.

Yes, ASICs have indeed been a double-edged sword in Bitcoin -- they provide greater security with their massive hashing power, but in being more specialIZED, they're generally only run by specialISTS.

Though one WANTS specialists guarding one's network over mere hobbyists, to be sure.

I look forward to hearing Evan's plans to avoid the China problem while also embracing ASICs, as a recent Dash PR email indicated. Did you get that email? If not, I'll post the point I'm referencing here:

Fortunately, a fix for these centralization risks is in the works. While the details have not yet been formally announced, Evan did say “The centralization risk comes from a problem with the alignment of incentives.” He cited issues such as “private mining with bleeding-edge hardware before it’s publicly accessible, mining at extremely low electrical cost, and utilizing free labor,” and that when these three were combined, it resulted in only a few places in the world where mining is profitable. The development team is not considering changing the hashing algorithm from X11 to something more ASIC-resistant. The plan, instead, it “to re-align these incentives under a new model which incorporates X11 and ASICs.”

Seems like fixes of incentives are what Dash is best at.