Well, if you don't mind, I will provide a few comments without specific quotes:
When you account for pooled mining, ASICS become completely irrelevant - it doesn't really matter whether there are 4000 corporate-owned ASIC farms or 4 000 000 individual GPU miners, because in both of those cases the equipment will be connected to 4-10 "megapools" which will be effectively in control of the network
It thus appears to me that, if empirical evidence is to be trusted, ASIC resistance (or lack thereof) will have little to no effect on "decentralization", primarily due to very strong centralization arising from "pool" infrastructure.
Well I dont think thats as dangerous a problem as corporate control by a long way. A pool cant misbehave much. If it does the users will realize and pull out and it'll go under.
P.S.:
My limited understanding of concepts involved suggests that "poolproof" design is possible, but my limited understanding of miner behavior suggests that it would be woefully unpopular.
Surely thats just a question of mining in much smaller parts, so that rewards are meaured in the Satoshis range instead of 25 whole coins. I think the harder but probably solveable problem if it was desired would be p2p traffic efficiency. I do think poolproof would be useful.
P.P.S.:
As far as alt-coins go, I would prefer ppcoin and namecoin over litecoin.
ppcoin seems interesting. I think I reinvented it or something similar, had another post in draft form, though ppcoin seems complicated at least the way its explained on the wiki (not sure I fully understood it from quick skim of wiki). Will post my similar idea next.
Adam