How is the pre-sale of a POW mined currency price at more than double current Nxt market price a fair distribution model? I wasn't a stakeholder in Nxt, but I bought right after launch when people were selling 1Mil Nxt for 1BTC. I thought to myself, "I could theoretically buy 1% of this currency, that will ever exist, for 10 BTC" to me that was a great risk but also a great deal.
While you correct about having 1% of the total funds out there, note the Transparent Forging:
http://www.thenxtwiki.org/wiki/Transparent_ForgingWhich in nutshell means that the genesis investors holding the majority of NXT, will also get the majority of transaction fees coins. In long run most of the transactions will pass through the genesis investors, making them a Visa / PayPal (?) of sorts, and continuing growing their holdings without any additional investment from their side.
Compare this to BTC, where ASIC's arms race forces the miners to continuously invest more of their gains back into ASIC mining, thus distributing the network and making it more secure.
By the way, note that such feature (inherently unfair to anyone joining after genesis) was again - added at will of the genesis investors. If a similar feature was put to voting say in MSC protocol, I'm not sure at all it would pass, due to the distribution:
http://mastercoin-explorer.com/addressesTo me, Ethereal is a slave of ASIC Miners, with a ridiculously high IPO price and no interest earned like eMu, so who is being fair?
While you may have a point about IPO price or getting back to ASIC dependency, as long as Vitalik and the team do not create artificial shortage by breaking on their own announcement (which exactly what NXT did), a much larger amount of people have a fair chance to join the IPO early, and spread the gains proportionally. And if the IPO is not attractive - well there are other 2nd gen options which are being launched these days or will be launched soon enough.