Taking a second look at this, how could the devs have overlooked this. Didn't Vertcoin switch from that algo for that very reason? Because ASICs for it were hitting the market. They were rendered useless pretty quickly though.
May be dev team have a lot of this ASIC so they choose this algo. In fact this ASICs was created by only one Estonian/Russian company some years ago and now you cant buy this new ASIC. I have bouhgt in Moscow 6 used Tritons fo $80-110 each. Each give 5-12 Mh/s (suppose some chips already broken) in Scrypt-N.