This is an issue, but shill accounts can be kept to an acceptable limit through the requirement of purchasing an initial stake rather than giving the ICO stakes away for free. NEM took the latter road and it's clear by now how things have turned out for those idiots. Their own leader, the now-forgotten UtopianFuture, accidentally signed a post from one of his own shill accounts by his UtopianFuture name, mistakenly thinking he was signed into his main account, and went down in utter disgrace. But since NXT stakes had to be purchased with bitcoin one could not simply multiply their stakes limited only by how many new accounts they could manage to create. Anyone who wanted multiple NXT stakes would have had to pay real money for them and I doubt many would have wanted to risk more than 1 BTC on something most people saw as a simple scam at time of ICO. This is why I think the number of original stake-holders is much higher than the low-ball estimates NXT's critics are always repeating, which range from 2-10. Anyway there's no way to know the exact number. Was the ICO perfect? No. Is it a critical flaw in the NXT ecosystem? I don't think so. If NXT has a lot of valuable features to offer the crypto world I'd say those features outway any unfairness in ICO. I'm not that bothered if a few lucky or smart folks get rich off of unfair ICO, if NXT allows me to use a decentralized marketplace, currency exchange, voting system etc. I'll use it just because it's useful to me. If enough other people see it that way NXT will take off big!