You're correct, and I suppose I phrased that wrong. Scrypt-Jane is a library and it can use a variety of mixing algorithms, of which Scrypt-Chacha was selected for all of the coins that use Scrypt-Jane implementations (YAC, YBC, UTC, CACH, MRC, THOR, etc.), at least as far as I'm aware. Basically, Scrypt-Jane instead of becoming a "library" just became a specific implementation in my opinion. Then Scrypt-N looked at things and said, "let's do something similar but change the way the Scrypt-Chacha N-Factors change" -- or maybe it's not really the same? Anyway, I don't worry too much about the distinction between the two approaches to adjustable N-Factor Scrypt as it's not really pertinent to most users.

As far as getting a rig mining with a specific N-Factor, in my experience it's far more easy to do this on the NVIDIA side than it is on the AMD side of things. Cudaminer/ccMiner is often not faster (though sometimes it is), but there's no mucking around with thread concurrency, intensity, etc. to worry about. Yes, the launch config can help, but I've always found it a little odd that we get HW errors in the first place -- I guess I don't know what they really mean, but an error suggests that the hardware performed all the calculations that were asked of it and somehow got the wrong answer. And with SGminer or whatever, if you go past certain levels of intensity these become very real, and also a real pain to debug. If you only have one rig, or perhaps if you have one type of rig (e.g. all of them are running R9 280X GPUs or similar), it's not the worst thing in the world, but if you have a variety of hardware (which I do), it means debugging on every single rig. It's why I eventually quit mining UTC/THOR/MRC/etc. (never mind that THOR ended up being a complete bust regardless).

I think the egalitarian viewpoint of things being "fairly" distributed just isn't going to happen in our current alt-coin world. Bitcoin and Litecoin had a chance at it (and still didn't succeed, because not enough people knew about it early on, or didn't bother, or whatever), but today? No way. Unless you can somehow force everyone to mine with some common set of hardware, and prevent anyone from renting servers (or mining rigs), and also stop people from mining with too many rigs, etc. what we now live in is a world where lots of people know enough that everything is always "unfair" to a large majority of the people. But do you know what? As a judge once told me, the concept of "fair" is usually just a lie perpetrated by people who simply want to get their way (or get more than others) often use as an excuse. "It's not fair that a doctor earns more money" is the same as saying "It's not fair that someone else got better grades on a test." Go read Harrison Bergeron for my perspective of what talk of "fairness" ends up becoming if taken too far. Forget the perception of being "fair" because at best you'll simply have a facade -- either the devs end up controlling an unfair percentage of coins, or the big miners do, or the IT professionals who take the time to set up multiple addresses do, or.... You get the point. The best thing for a coin is to have people use it for real stuff. Bitcoin is now at this point (I figure when Newegg is accepting BTC payments, we're basically at the level of mass acceptance), but everything else is lagging far behind.

It's not a question of whether Scrypt-Chacha is using less power as N-Factor increases, so much as it is a question of how much power Scrypt coins in general are using. Anyone that has been mining for a while knows that Scrypt was harder on GPUs and used more power than SHA256, and Scrypt-N is harder still and uses more power than Scrypt. Scrypt-Chacha tends to end up being somewhere between Scrypt and Scrypt-N in terms of power and stress on the GPUs. I think at one point you or someone else measured a decrease in power use of 7W going from NF-12 to NF-13 or something (maybe it was NF-9 vs. NF-13?) Anyway, let's say it's 7W less on a GPU that uses 225W. Now compare that with X11/X13/X14/X15/Cryptonight... all of these use about half as much power as Scrypt mining, the cards run cooler (and quieter), and long-term the hardware is thus less likely to fail.

Incidentally, I've had all of the fans on my dual-fan Sapphire 7950 cards fail thanks to Scrypt/Scrypt-N/Scyrpt-Chacha -- I replaced them with 120mm fans and box fans, as buying real replacements was a joke. ($40 for two small fans!? No thanks, and they'd just fail again in another 3-6 months.) I have a friend that purchased three single-fan 7970 cards and ended up having all three cards die after about six months (yes, overclocking was involved, so it's partly his fault). The number of R9 290X GPUs that have failed due to overclocking + mining is rather high considering the age of the Hawaii GPUs as well. But if you mine X11 or some other "less stressful" algorithm, it's more like running games in that the GPUs aren't pegged at 100% use and 85C+ temperatures 24/7.