Distribution is a never-ending process. Imagine that all 73 initial holders were friends of the coin creator. We can move zero point to the moment when they got their coins and started distributing them to the others. What does it change? Nothing. It's the same as if the creator makes distribution from 73 genesis accounts instead of 1. The only difference is "perception" problem of those whose IQ is not high enough to get all this. The topic of Nxt distribution is a good litmus test, it allows to distinguish between normal people and people with low intelligence if we has already removed trolls from the set.
It's one thing to have a person distributing all the coins to himself and then trying to convince you that the 70M+ marketcap you see in coinmarketcap is "fair" and it's slighlty different if he tries to make a distribution to 73 people sound fair (he has slightly more chances to convince you that the 70M+ marketcap is "fair")
So, the only problem I see is the posible intentions of the creator and friends, they created an illution of "free market" while they were just controlling the "supply" and consequently the price, they wanted to sell their "premined coins" at 20/50/70+ Million dollars marketcap and that's what they did. In my oppinion the real distribution of NXT started on the exchanges at manipulated prices.
What happened belongs in the past and the only questions I would ask myself are: if creator and friends did what is rumored they did, will they try to do something similar in the future? are those people still around? how can we be sure?
Having said that, I have also to say that there are probably a lot of people that work really hard in order to make NXT a success and have nothing to do with the above.