I also think some of the forks (and perhaps all of them so far) have been launched in ways which are only minimally better and also created a huge advantage for their early participants.
I'm perplexed at you how think a premine of 80% at release is only "marginally" worse than say Monero, which won't be 80% mined for about 4 years and which has only been mined about 4% so far. I don't know when you draw the line between early participants though. I kind of think that everyone involved with bitcoin now is an "early participant."
I like your slow-start launch ideas though. If I'm ever involved with another coin launch those ideas will likely be used.
or set things up so that sketchy deoptimizations games were needed sketchy deoptimizations games were needed.
Sketchy deoptimization games were
never needed. The original code could have been released in at least a some baseline efficient form (e.g. not doing massive recalculations inside a loop for no reason). It is hard to know you've released something that still can't be optimized in some clever way, but the obvious stuff? No excuse other than pure sketch here.
(in fact, I've not even managed to get any real thoughtful tech discussions out of it few to none of the people posting here seem to actually understand the tech, and instead everyone is just flinging poo about their favorite forks). Perhaps in the future I should not forget to add the caveat that while the tech is neat and deserves more attention, like most altcoins the community is full of speculators who actively repel technical folks with wild accusations stemming from an apparent inability to understand that not everyone is so desperately greedy... It's doubly hilarious, in that it's so thoroughly counter productive I don't approve of the pump behavior and won't try to encourage it, but I certantly could bring a huge amount of attention to this space by pointing how how powerful the technology is to people but I'm certantly less inclined to do so when simply speaking my mined gets me accused of being one of y'all coin pumpers even by the selfsame folks who would benefit from it.. I mean, wtf are you thinking?
I'm not quite sure how to respond to this except to say that you may well be on the wrong thread. First of all, the designers of BCN don't even seem to be here at all unless it is in the form of some sock puppet (I even doubt that). Second, while the Monero thread has its share of speculators, pumpers and FUDsters (apparently on a mission from the DRK side), we actually have quite interesting technical discussions over there. The Boolberry thread does as well. I can't speak for the others.