I wonder what the Neucoin team thinks mining is buying them.

They are paying 164304 Neucoin per day to the miners, who just dump it on the market.

Each block that's mined has so such a small internal trust value that it can be wiped out on a whim (as shown by this latest fiasco), so its not helping with security at all. In fact, it hurts it because if people using Neucoin don't know the difference between PoW and PoS blocks, they won't realize that having 100 PoW confirmations of their transaction means nothing.