What is the reasoning behind having a coin release with a sub 1 difficulty in todays day and age?
Short answer is: If you clone litecoin code with minimal changes then you have to mine the genesis block _with a CPU_ at difficulty one. That's going to potentially take a long time. Therefore you have to add code to immediately raise the difficulty at block two or shortly after. Which appears to be the case here.
How long is a long time approx.? Say, if an 8 core proc was used. I'm not looking for exact.