Why did early adopters need to have easy access to huge numbers of coins? Wasn't as if they could do anything with them back then. It is ridiculous that so early on in Bitcoin's life the mining difficulty is already so high, all because so much was taken at the start
Difficulty is high because hashpower is high. It has nothing to do with the total # of coins mined.
Right, so why not do the inverse? The more users the easier to generate? The way things have been done the distribution is so ridiculously skewed to a tiny base of early users it is a systemic risk.