if the launch was public knowledge, and there was no funny business with changing coin supply, or some people had access to better miners etc, then it's OK IMO
As far as I know that is what happened.
I saw the post on bitcointalk and like many new coins that I have mined I decided to mine it. I presume other people also saw that post.
And especially after he had basically talked me out of thinking that Bitshares might be a credible team to partner with.
I don't remember ever discussing Bitshares with you or anyone else. It seems unlikely because with one small exception I have always been entirely ignorant about Bitshares, something that even today puts me at a disadvantage in understanding Steem (since it is based closely on Bitshares). The exception is that I was pretty sure their original model of pegged assets was catastrophically unstable and would not work. They later added a price feed, which improved it somewhat.
It may be that I made some general remarks that could be interpreted as arguing against the success of Bitshares model, but I don't know.
Btw, I heard about Dan Larimer's plan to stealth mine when he first published the blog post about using such a technique to launch and avoid legal issues of ICOs. I believe I was the one who mentioned it to smooth because of the communication between us about legality and ethics of ICOs and distribution schemes. I did not mine Steemit.
The blog post was not made until several days after the Steem launch. I was already mining it.