I must say I saw this 5000 thing differently than most. It was in plain sight so not stealing since we could mine solo or not at all so our choice. Since the pool is being run by the developers I assumed that they were short on Wampum and needed to raise some for development. To be perfectly honest all the messing around with the pool (1%, 25%, 1%, 25%, 2%, then just 5% off the top) has really hurt Wampumcoin. There used to be a pretty good bunch of reliable miners that were all scared off by this consistent monkeying around, myself included.
I disagree that it was in "plain sight". I stumbled upon it by accident because the payout numbers seemed strange to to me. In fact, if you look at the round data about the time this mess started, you'll see it is very screwed up, almost as if someone might have been monkeying around trying to cover the shenanigans up and was having trouble doing so. After it a bit it looks like they just gave up and stopped trying to make look like 100,000 coins were distributed and let it display 95,000.
But I agree with your thoughts about their motivations. Why? It just seems so stupid.
Still, I don't like it when people try to cheat me, even if there's no money or real value involved. It's just part of human behavior. People get mad when cheated.
Can the coin be salvaged? I don't know. Like you said, trust is an issue, but I'm willing to consider proposals.