Hardforks tend to be part of the process so a change in rewards is not necessarily a bad thing.
With 2 millions of coins mined in 2 days this is really bad.
One of the reason why people respect Bitcoin is because they don't change the mining rewards. Also, a lot of hard forks is really bad. Hard fork should be an exception, not the rule.
In the case of Vericoin, I'm pretty sure they got fucked by Mintpal although that is debatable. I read somewhere the VeriCoin devs had huge regrets afterwards because it divided the Community and ultimately did a lot of damage but they were in a bind and had to do something otherwise there may have been 30% of the Coins floating around of other peoples Coins which they would lose and would crash the price for everyone else.
And Vericoin price falled around 90% since then.