Why do you insist it's Dash's responsibility to change whether people view Bitcoin as ponzi or not?
Dash has enough transparency. If you're demanding to know how much each dev owns for example then sorry, I'm afraid it's not gonna happen.
Fairness - very subjective. Life is not fair. Miss the lunch and you miss the lunch. Don't buy cheap and miss the profits. There's always someone to complain about something.
Highest standard of ethics - is that standard defined by you?
Look if you want to deny the issue exists and personalize it as being all about this insignificant smooth guy (or some even smaller coin Monero), that's your prerogative. But the fact is that people who look at Dash see a massive instamine scam as one of the defining characteristics. That devtome investigation had nothing to do with me or Monero (or to my knowledge AdamWhite, etc.). Several of the threads about the instamine had nothing to do with Monero (some predate it). If you talk to people in the crypto community who have nothing to do with either coin if they've heard of it, they are well aware of the "darkcoin instamine" and think it is very shady and a holdover from the worst era of altcoin scams, whether
you illodin, think so or not, and whether that is even fair or not.
There is no way the stigma is ever going away. All that pushing this project is doing now is making crypto look bad. There is talent in this project, sure, but it's being wasted on a coin that is essentially a dead end beyond the small altcoin world.