In theory all the Z9's are already running and have been counted in the hashrate. That's what everyone says, that they have been running for months. So why are the DEVs getting their panties in a bunch? When Batch 1 is released it shouldn't raise the hashrate at all correct? It's batches after that we have to worry about.
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Another possible scenario - and one that is much smarter/devious - is to only use a fraction of a batch of ASIC miners before selling the rest of the batch to the public. The network hashrate will go up once people start receiving their miners and no one will be the wiser.
Also, Bitmain would most likely stick to mining the coin with the highest network hashrate with their ASICs - ie, ZEC in the case of Equihash - whereas the public will mine various coins, resulting in massive network hashrate increases for those smaller coins. See, for example, DERO with CryptoNight - it went from a pokey 5MH/s to eclipsing 600MH/s - yes, it's network hashrate exceeds that of ZEC (I consider CryptoNight and Equihash comparable because you can get roughly the same hashrate with the same hardware).
Excellent points, MagicSmoker.
Thanks for sharing...