Any CPU only coin is useless. Just a get rich quick scheme for botnet owners controlling 50,000 computers. Either the algorithm has to be changed, or it has to go myriadcoin style somehow.
I mined BMR on day 2 and got 0. God forbid someone tries to CPU mine it a month from now. Coin is dead in the water until it's not CPU only.
That's called bad luck. I mined on day 2 with a stock CPU and found a couple blocks, which is about what's expected.
I like the idea of CPU mining sounds more fair to me although I don't have scientific data to prove my hypotheses. But Mining is a 24h a day job intensive CPU usage..., so if I have a 10000 nodes botnet I would not risk to loose it (except for a very valuable coin) ... much better sell or rent a botnet on black markert to ddos targets ...
There's an interesting discussion of the merits of CPU mining in the Cryptonote whitepaper. They don't necessarily inherently support CPU only, but essentially wanted to return to the original proposal of Satoshi of one CPU = one vote. Their goal with the PoW was to minimize the relative advantage of any type (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) of hardware.
I agree with you re: botnets. It seems highly improbable to me that the botnets are sitting here monitoring a bitcoin forum waiting to flood into a week-old currency that currently has no method of exchange. As you've mentioned there are a lot more profitable ways a malevolent user can use a botnet. And if they did want to mine, why wouldn't they target something like DRK that can be profitably CPU mined and has direct exchange for BTC already in place?