Imagine if Satoshi were paid in Devcoins instead. If Satoshi had millions of Devcoins, or even billions, it just would not work because there is no reason to mine Devcoins when 90% of profits go to the developers. Ethicoin has the advantage here in that it's fairly distributed 50/50 which to me makes a lot of sense.
Actually i suspect it makes less sense.
I think it might make more sense to limit each group/category to 10%, not just the miners.
Like maybe 10% for miners, 10% for writers, 10% for coders, 10% for businesses, 10% for media presences (e.g. websites), 10% for hardware (the chips and circuit boards and 3d printers and spaceships and so on), etc. not sure of 10 good categories offhand so maybe a few floating tithes, used to add focus to one or more of the categories at times when a specific category is temporarily needing more work than the others?
Half for merged-mining, half for everyone else seems way too miner-centric, but I guess that is why they don't plan to merged-mine: they are struggling to come up with the next major pump and dump coin so obviously need the miners to get lots of money fast and to get the lion's share, and merged mining would too clearly undercut the "importance" of the pump and dumpers er I mean miners...
-MarkM-