My thoughts on XEV:
First of all, the author doesn't have a very clear description of the XEV effect, and only tells the community when and how to get XEV.
The dev does give a clear description of the XEV project. It's initially going to be a fork of NEM, then get enhanced after the main net starts. NEM itself was going to be started as a NXT fork, the ideas for enhanced features came after its distribution phase.
At the current time, Nevra's final mainnet may be inherently based on NEM. The goal will to be initially fork off of NEM and iterate on technical features, enhancing them
.
NEM gathered a community of developers with the skill sets to add enhanced features, and XEV is at the developer gathering phase. We won't know what enhanced features can be added until the developer team is fully formed, and its skill sets known.