And a few more possible reasons:
The projections probably made assumptions about the distribution of survey coins and other coins that were most likely off.
It was probably assumed that these coins would contribute to growth with some high percentage transferring to growth accounts. That probably didn't happen and instead I have a feeling a good portion of that distribution was either sold or are being held in private wallets The same for many pre-sale buyers.
I would suspect many private held private wallets probably just aren't staking. It's pretty clear the neucoin didn't think as many people would choose to hold privately and instead would go for the growth account option.
You should add some numbers here. Given the distribution I'm not sure that this ^ would explain the huge difference.
My take is that they messed up the Peercoin code by modifying stuff they have no clue about. And with Koubiac gone all the knowledge was gone as well. The professional scammer Daniel Kaufmann didn't care, because he wanted to make money. After postponing the launch he decided that instead of giving up, let's give it a shot. But with only web-developers left in the team and an entirely f*cked up project (code, community, team, distribution design, public perception, economic design) this undertaking is obviously pointless. A normal coin would move towards a market price of zero, because people would jump ship. But due to no third party holding any noteworthy amount of Neucon and the regime buying the coins at a fixed rate we just see their BTC-account diminish (for now).
I'm really curious about the timestamp orphan explanation they will give you.
Dan supporting the price is like when you've bought a website from someone and its dead but you're still paying domain registration and hosting cause you might do something with it in the future so you keep it alive