Yes only 1/10th of the tokens are released to the Public . . . the rest goes to Kik and the Kin Team. How they can call this decentralised I'm unsure . . . also the the ICO cap is 75 million x 10 so they're valuing Kin at 750m already, not really in favour of investors.
I'd rather invest my money in Status it's closest competitor.
Yes, I have some Status, and I'm watching Kin but not joining the ICO. I too would rather keep my Status tokens.
I am keeping a close eye on Kik/Kin as a rival. I can't see why they really need a token for what they're doing, but obviously they're an established company with a big reach, so they can't be ignored.
The KIN project is pretty similar to Status though. Status also had an ICO with a high cap. They collected around $90b if I'm not mistaken. There will be almost 7 trillion ! tokens in circulation. And while more SNT tokens were distributed during the ICO, they are currently trading about 4x lower than during the ICO.
I bought my SNT tokens at around 0.00001 BTC but they have still lost a lot af value since then (-44%). If this is any indication for the future of KIN then it's clear we'll need a lot of patience. I still believe in the long term success of these platforms though, so I'll hodling for a long time to come.