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I really like your idea of scaling up difficulty based on the number of domain operations in a block to prevent the key:value database from growing arbitrarily big.
It seems to me that should be enough to make domain operation pricing correct; I don't see why there needs to be a block reward or fees, I assume the registrars will charge whatever they need to charge to make a profit, and I would strongly encourage you to avoid making the DNS system yet-another-currency. I'd like to use dollars or euros or bitcoins (preferably bitcoins) to pay for my domain names, please.
I imagine a system something like:
+ I give some money to a registrar, and ask them to register/renew/transfer 'gavinandresen.dianna'
+ The registrar makes sure the register/renew/transfer operation is valid
+ The registrar bundles up a bunch of register/renew/transfer operations and then asks/pays a Bitcoin miner to merge-mine that hash to securely timestamp those changes
+ After they're timestamped, the registrar asks that all of those record changes be inserted into a shared distributed hash table, providing the DIANNA proof-of-work and the bitcoin block hash.
+ The nodes maintaining the shared DHT make sure the records have the right DIANNA proof-of-work, that the bitcoin block is valid, and that the changes aren't over-ridden by a later bitcoin block, and then update the records.