The whole too-low-initial-difficulty plus exponential distribution thing seems to be a trope now. Bitcoin's initial difficulty was high enough (relative to existing hardware and software) that it couldn't even keep up with its 10 minute target during the first year. If I were crazy enough to launch an altcoin I'd set it so that the real mining didn't begin until it crossed some somewhat reasonable difficulty to reduce the land grab intensity, because it smells pretty fishy otherwise.
Altcoins don't have the luxury of bitcoin. Not even litecoin has it (next year it'll produce another 10mn coins over the existing 29mn - requiring >100mn USD to buy these, so its price has only one way to go... DOWN)... In effect steady minting of coins leads to dead coins due to inflation.
People can't afford to have a coin that goes like 1mn coin this year, 2mn next year, 3mn the year after etc etc. It's guaranteed suicide in terms of investment. Especially in the first months, inflation can be like 2-3% per day, requiring hundreds of BTCs to keep prices steady.
Hence the fast-reward at the start / slower or even no reward (PoS/PoW) thereafter for modern coins.
(With DRK it was a case of too low diff at the launch and too slow diff retargeting which spewed coins like crazy.)