A fair distribution is one of the most important factors for NEM in my opinion.
Imho it's desireable but it can't be the most important thing. It's not something that will get us to where we want to be. If we really want to create something awesome then we need more than just the fair distribution argument.
I do believe we have everything we needt though. There are some great ideas in play regarding forging and the network design so I'm confident we'll have more to offer than just fair distribution.
Agreed, there need to be other factors as well.
I only think if we end up with far less users than planned and instead have lots of users which hold 10-50 stakes each, then this this will hurt NEM a lot.
I just had a look into the registration thread and it is a bit worrying to me to see that 80% of the users who buy in there are brandnew accounts.
On the plus side I think NEM has a very promising team of people who are driving the coin development and also the community seems to built up nicely with some active people at this stage already.