Will watch this.
In 2014, anything over a 1% premine was astronomically greedy, so I don't quite agree that a 5ish % premine is low at all. But if there's considerable, documented work that went into the ASIC proof algo, then that may be justified.
Things have changed quite a bit in this space, but I agree pre-mines have gotten larger over time. With coins and tokens unabashedly retaining 25-50% of their coins to sell under ICO these days, we view the premine as relatively small.
The thing I'd like to add here is: Mochimo is a completely new architecture, and has been coded from a blank page. We're not cutting and pasting or re purposing other people's code like 99%+ of the players in the crypto space. It's all brand new and it is a LOT of work. It is also one of the best-documented codebases in the space, and has been designed from day one with the intention of being easy to understand/modify to allow future generations to improve on it.
That being said, we have several very accomplished engineers on this team (I am, myself, a CCIE and expert network security engineer and I haven't taken a contract since August). Many of us work on it more than full-time. Our lead C developer logs 60 hour weeks and forgets to eat.
We're all in on this, so I hope that people will allow us the 4.44% premine we've set aside for the developers.