What is interesting to me is that in the (IMO very unlikely) event that Nxt has technical promise, then as soon as the code is open-source it will be possible to create Nxt-clone using the
spin-off mechanism and immediately bootstrap the clone with a more efficient distribution than Nxt-original.
Spinoffs are why nxt is trying to keep things as secret as possible for as long as possible. We can hardly blame them for that. Obviously the strategy would be to be far enough ahead in the innovation and adoption cycle that the rest would seen as imitators, not innovators.
I don't know if it's fair to say nxt has no technical promise. They seem to already have created some in innovations. Yet, the elephant in the room is the nothing at stake issue at this point. Or seems to be anyway.
Whether they can solve that remains to be seen.
You bring up a good point about distribution though. If nxt did create a major breakthrough, it would certainly be nice to capitalize on that with a bitcoin based distribution, rather than speculating on a new altcoin.
Would your bootstrapping protocol work with nxt even though the coins are so different?