I'm not a Bytecoin supporter I have invested only ten dollar in Bytecoin I prefer other cryptocurrencies however Bytecoin whatever thing you can say about developers sincerity, that very likely have lied about the date, was easily available both for free with faucets, with hilariously low prices and easy to mine even with an home PC...
The problem is fundamentally that if there's a whale that owns 80% of the stash, he can manipulate it in just any direction. No coin, "however cheap" for the rest of the 20% that is available, is believable if someone owns 80% of it.
This is also the problem with DASH: most probably half of the stash is in the hands of Evan Inc. And a smaller but similar problem exists with ETH. With bitcoin, if Satoshi has still his keys, this is a problem too, but most probably, these coins are dead.
I had the impression that there are no monero whales of that size. That there is a power distribution of possession is normal: all assets are power-law distributed after a while. But there should be an upper limit to the amount that is in the hands of a single entity, so that it cannot entirely manipulate the market. Pump and dump, sure. Unavoidable. But not at a level that was the case with Bytecoin.
Your impression is wrong because premine isn't only way to control the most of supply. A decent Monero home mining was impossible since the first days due to hash power dispatched by developer\investors. If few people has the most of the supply I don't deserve a fuck if they have premined or they control the supply with botnets since the days after launch, the result is the same, few people own the coin and who want them have to buy from them. Bytecoin and Dash are more mined by their developers but given you the possibility to get easily a decent amount as early adopters, with Monero this wasn't possible and this isn't normal in any legit coin, unless they use large cloud botnet to control the supply since day one. Now over 14 million Monero have been mined, the double of Dash. WHO has mined them??? Certainly not a large group of users but mining clusters.
Without mention the shitty behaviors used by Monero crew to steal technology and defame the coin that have copied.