I don't even see it as an edge or advantage for us.  I hold these coins, but so do a lot of other people, and we're just exchanging them for another coin.  In the case of Sapience in particular, I paid over .0002BTC for a lot of my coins.  I've averaged down closer to .00015, but I don't think I'm giving myself a bonus by exchanging them at half that rate.  I'm still losing money, while anyone who buys during the exchange at 7500 will have an advantage over me and get their BARR cheaper than me when they exchange their Sapience. 

Of course people will suspect something dishonest, since that's what usually happens.  But I don't see anything dishonest about us burning our own coins.

Think about it like this:  What would people say if we started this project and didn't burn our own coins?  "Why should anyone else burn their coins if the devs won't even burn their own?"

Some people will say it's a scam because we're burning our own coins, but they would also say it was a scam if we didn't.  Since we can't stop people from saying that, no matter what we do, we're just going to let people see for themselves.

If we started by burning a coin we don't own any of - let's say ULTC - that coin would have plenty of its own whales.  Every coin will have both small and large holders.  The difference is that we don't know any ULTC whales, so we have no way of getting them to participate in a brand new project.  We need to start with our own coins and lead by example, because nobody else is going to do it until we get it going ourselves.

 If we started by burning ULTC, and nobody participated, then this project would seem like a complete failure to everyone.  Then we wouldn't have much chance of creating buzz and getting participation for the next coin.  So even though I don't hold any ULTC, I would try to become a ULTC whale during the exchange period, in order to make sure some ULTC gets burned.

I think that's one thing people aren't understanding - we want to burn as much of these coins as we can, up to 100% of the entire supply.  That means if we're not whales already, we're going to try and become whales in every coin we offer.  And then we're going to burn it all.  The fact that I'm personally a whale in our launch coins makes perfect sense, rather than being anything negative.  It's a big reason why this project will work, and there's no other way it could be done.