Of course in the end what really matters and leads to success if the quality of the project and of the team. However, I believe that the policy of excessive discounts during ICO's will eventually kill the ICO industry, since it favours short time speculations, a phenomenon which in time will keep long term investors away.
At the moment, the discount is due to selling as many tokens as possible and not to burn them.
Well, that is an interesting motivation. My consideration was just more generally referreing to the whole world of ICOs, which have managed to fuck up with their greed - encouraging speculation for the purpose of getting more contribution - an otherwise very promising sector.