I fear that Scrypt's way to implement RAM, and now Scrypt-N's to implement way more RAM, will have a boomerang effect in trying to prevent centralization, creating more centralization as an unintended mid-term consequence.
You mean to say that asics for scrypt-n will be more expensive so less people can afford one??
The Litecoin devs are right in one thing: If a coin is mine-able in a GPU, it's game over. ASICs are just a matter of time from that point onwards. The thought however of making the ASICs expensive through much RAM, is something that will escalate ASIC prices and reduce the affordability of ASIC miners for the masses.
If a coin is gpu-minable then everything is ok. Where it goes wrong is when it gets asic-minable.
If RAM was not a part of the equation, a greater degree of decentralization could occur once a coin moves from the GPU to the ASIC cycle of mining, through affordable ASICs that normal people can actually buy without paying a fortune. So the fact that ASICs will have to be very costly in order to have much RAM, is not really good down the road.
You are missing the point. The point is asics should never be given a chance. What happens when asics arrive is irrelevant. Furthermore: a coin is not dead when asics arrive, the coin's PoW is dead when asics arrive.
The biggest problem with asics is their scalability. Compared to gpu's they need no external hardware worth mentioning. Affordable asics are as worse as very expensive asics because affordable asics will allow mining factories to be setup by anyone willing to do so. Expensive asics will leave the option open for the asic producer to setup a giant mining factory (as producing asics gets very cheap when the numbers go up). And the control over the coin is transferred from the mining community to the asic producer(s) in the long run.