Factual account:

It was announced in public on an ANN thread at launch, the full source code was released. There were no real instructions and no binaries. No real feature list was provided, nor development plans. You had to figure it all out on your own. That was done deliberately to give the developer an advantage in mining, and they said so on the thread. Later the dev wrote a blog post about it.

There was one relaunch after the first few days, and it is disputed whether was shenanigans or not (someone accused the devs of doing it because the devs' miners crashed and others got to mine too much; the devs claim a serious bug required it and this is verifiable in github). Even if it were, the devs didn't get much of an edge from it, if at all, since the relaunch was announced in advance and the same conditions as above applied to the relaunch as well.

If you were able to figure it out, you were on a level playing field with the developers, and it ran as pure PoW with flat mining rewards for a week. Pure PoW then continued for three weeks with declining (but still good) rewards before switching to a hybrid system with 90% DPoS, 5% PoW, and 5% runner-up DPoS (meaning those who aren't voted in to the witness set still get to produce blocks occasionally; if you just vote for yourself this is somewhat like PoS). At some point during the month, when the devs had mined as much as they wanted, they turned off their miners and let others mine at reduced difficulty.

I had no inside information or affiliation with the devs and I was able to mine a good chunk (roughly 1.5% of the total), but still the devs mined probably about 80% as their plan worked as intended. If I hadn't made one logistical mistake (my own fault -- no way to blame the devs for it), my stash would be about 3-4x larger.