I fully agree here. While I'm not one of the "early squatters", I hold some names and will gladly give them for free (together with free help in configuration) to anyone who wants to set up a real website in earnest. I've already seen "statistics" like "oh look, what a mess, 99% of .bit domains are only squatted and not resolving to a website!" a lot, and think that this is mostly due not to squatting being such a bad problem, but because there simply isn't yet enough demand to build .bit websites. I'm sure that, when .bit gets more popular and more people can actually resolve it, this fraction will improve by a lot.
Just doing ".bit" like a ".com" is by itself not interesting. The ability to change DNS by consensus is extremely powerful in different ways than that. So the incentive to build a "bit" website is very small indeed. You have to get all users to install new software, for very little benefit. Which is why NMC hasn't taken off. It's rather the potential that is fascinating. Once there are incentives to switch to alternatives, the dynamic changes.
Squatting is an issue because we are mapping names from the real world (trademark names such as "Google", "Coke", ...) to a virtual world. So the first come first serve principle is not very good. One needs more sophisticated rules than that.