It seems like you could just take Ripples strengths and perhaps make it so it isn't pre-mined and it would ultimately be superior to bitcoin. Actually there are probably some other alt coins that are superior to bitcoin but it has first mover advantage and most all of the attention.
I think there is value to having programmers working on Ripple, but once it's done it's mostly done. That's not worth 20% of the entire economy (what they keep ). They should have done a combo of mining + non mining - 50% is mined , 40% given away 10% kept