The way of distribution can't decide the fate of any altcoin. The most important part is its feature and the dev team.NXT has more potential, which has a great dev team!
Actually distribution is directly correlated across alt coins and all economic systems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x23C1sQg6wQ
BTW, JL and Kushti at NXT are great devs, I agree with you on that for sure. They both work extremely hard and are quite talented.