I'm curious as to why ETH should fetch a large value. Bitcoin has value because it is explicitly a store of value, as well as a payment system. Transfer fees are pretty much insignificant (cents). Ethereum's value only comes from it's ability to run decentralized Turing-complete code. Since you're paying per execution, most people will actually want the value of ETH to be low as possible, so they can execute their programs as cheaply as possible. This will lead to people rapidly dumping when they feel the price is too high, and sitting on the sidelines to wait until prices are reasonable and then buy in and quickly run their scripts at a cheaper price. Or, more likely, most people won't hold ETH at all, and only buy in a small amount at market price to cover the cost of whatever script they need to run. Large initial inflation combined with no software running on the network in the beginning will mean ETH effectively won't have any intrinsic value until the first programs are released. Any rises in value after the IPO and before the release of programs will be purely speculative.

Then comes the issue of copycats. Unless the developers put safeguards in place to prevent programs on the ETH network being able to run on Cheaper-ETH network, what's to stop someone from creating a copy and convincing everyone to move their programs over due to attractive low fees that is bound to attract an exponentially larger userbase?

Lastly, while it may seem the developer's interests are aligned with the project with their 50% premine, this is not particularly true. They are basically making investors pay for their 50% ETH. So they have no incentive to preserve it's value. Whatever value they dump it at, it will be 100% pure profit on top of the millions in USD they get.

They are also paying roughly 500 BTC for someone to develop a client(s)? Seems like excessive spending, IMO.

All of these factors make ETH an extremely unattractive investment to make. Sure, some people believe in the idea behind it. But the fact is that if there is no incentive to balance out the huge risk investors are taking, then they won't take the risk.