You didn't read a word, did you?
Of course I did, but I'm failing to see the
practical difference between simply handing a disproportionately large amount of the coins to a select few controlling entities, and awarding them the coins after a (mostly) trivial amount of mining. You can theorize about the altruistic and right-minded nature of the founders and early adopters (and I'm certainly not saying you're wrong), but those same arguments could just as easily support pre/instamined coins. At the end of the day, they control a significantly larger amount of coins than the amount of work they put into mining them relative to those that come later, regardless of what they choose to do with them.
I should note that I'm not begrudging them the right to do whatever the hell they want with their coin. I've never understood the people that bitch and moan about premined coins, like it was their God-given right to a fair shake for a particular coin. Maxcoin is a great recent example. Personally I just vote with my hash power and go elsewhere if I don't like a coin or its profitability is low. I like Darkcoin and would probably buy into it if I weren't risk averse and tend to avoid speculation.
I think I understand what you are saying, and from one perspective, yes, more coins were mined in the beginning. So, people who mined them in the beginning have a larger share at the moment. I look at it as a way to achieve some manageable number of initial coins without personally favoring anyone - if you were willing to mine (and knew about it, of course), you could share int he higher rate as well. I think that is the main difference between premining - in which a select group of people get more coins - and variable difficulty - in which anyone could get more coins. Yes, some people had an "advantage" by being early adopters. If you had bought bitcoins when they were about $1 each, where they were a little more than a year ago, you would have an advantage now.
Bottom line, IMHO, the variable difficulty awarded people who were willing to jump in and participate early without the dev playing favorites. Mathematics and initiative are the only two things that gave anyone an advantage with darkcoin.