No, I don't see this as an excuse - in fact, I am writing a white paper at the moment which has parallels to Tangle, but it has a mining subsidy and I want to be sure that I've covered all the angles, so the fact you chose to disallow it is important to me.
Is it possible to see the draft? I wanted subsidy because 2% annual inflation is believed to be good for a monetary system. If Iota community doesn't mind we could delay the release for a week to add the inflation...
It's very rough in its current state, I'm not sure I'm ready to release a draft yet. I can say, however, that this design has a deterministic ordering, pays a subsidy for every block, and also rewards participation on the longest chain (of branches) of difficulty.
edit: I am completely happy for you to PM me or to discuss the finer points of how this is supposed to work here, because attack vectors are hard to enumerate fully.