In 2014 there was 3000 stakeholders.
Most were sockpuppets. UP was the one who came up with the communist sounding idea "equal shares for all" but that was terrible idea for distribution. It encouraged sock puppets. Ethereum didn't have to deal with sockpuppet problem at all. More money you invested, more coins you got. YOu don't have to create fake accounts. Pretty simple, fair and effective
and developers got funded.
Crypti raised around $100,000 - $200,000. Crypti to this day is a closed source project and was plagiarizing content and ideas for their ICO from the "free-er" 2.0 projects, including NXT, NEM and NODE.
It wouldn't be the NEM we know but NEM if it went ICO could definitely had raised way more than Crypti. 2014 was the year of the Call for Participation and similar distributions and nobody does them anymore for a reason. I would rather have the NEM developers sitting on $500K+ than on a 71% premine.
Now we have to wait for NEM developers to dump their premines and wait for the lazy dolphins, regular stakeholders and remaining sock masters to dump. This coin needs to be consolidated by people who actually want to work on it.
You guys live in fantasy land where you want people to work hard for free, without seeing fruit of their labor. In Bitcoin's case - that was on the floor for ages and the people who worked hard on it and made it a success were all sitting on at least 100,000+ coins and they didn't have to spend much either.
NEM just needs to crash in price and let consolidation happen.