Ok. Seems quite lame indeed....
Good, I'm sorry if it was disproportional.
My main questions were about skyrocket difficulty, a potentially unfair optimized miners, and an unfair take-over-control procedure.
As the miner is open-source now, and the difficulty chart can't be explained anyhow, the only one to ask you is how did it happen with the renaming and cloning the git.
There's nothing surprising about a skyrocketing difficulty for a CPU-only coin. This EXACT SAME THING happened with Heavycoin (HVC), Darkcoin, Frozencoin, and various others as well. Let me give you a quick bit of math.
Mining on an i7-4770K CPU right now, if you mine DRK you'll earn about $0.15 per day. Mine HIRO (DRK without DarkSend) and you can make $0.30 per day right now. XPM is similar in that it's around $0.27 per day. And then we get to Monero (MRO), which at the current high bid price of 0.0009 BTC per MRO will generate approximately $1.67 per day. Now, you have to give it time, as you're not going to find blocks very frequently with a single i7-4770K, but for example I have enough mining rigs that I'm able to run around 150 H/s and I'm finding a block or two per day. The pay rate for MRO right now is so much higher than any other "CPU only" coin that anyone with access to a bunch of CPUs is going to take notice. Period. End of conspiracy.
TL;DR: You're not the only person mining crypto. Duh.