question from this noob to others who've been closely following this coin:
could anyone summarise what's special about it?
have the devs lived up to their promises?
Any hidden problems -
premines?
instamines?
you'll have to read thread posts an make your own judgement on that. The majority still here don't think so. In summary, when the coin was released it was mistakenly left as scrypt and bcrypt wasn't "switched on". This lead to a re-launch, there was a pre-mine to fund giving everybody back 10% of what they had mined as scrypt. To be fair the dev was always up-front that this could happen following the discovery. Some people were annoyed at the re-launch and only getting back 10% but on reflection it's probably fairer that way.
well distributed?
since it can only be mined by CPU currently it's as well distributed as it can be. That said it's not had massive exposure yet so there are only a few mining I guess.
is there a rich list?
not that I'm aware of?
buggy code?
besides an early wallet issue which was cosmetic only, no problems i know of
are these are hard core programmers, not "copy-paste" devs or middlemen?
judge for yourself, this is an algo that NOBODY else has implemented. You don't do that as a copy/paste dev. Also, as yet, nobody has managed to create an external miner and pool for it, if it were 'easy' to do generically that would have been done by now
When bugs/fork challenge popped up, were they fixed quickly?
yes
dev squabbles?
only a minor spat with a disgruntled scrypt miner who comes back and shouts scam every once in a while
dev complacency?
no but maybe fair to say limited time at the moment
missed deadlines?
Anything to worry about?
probably a lot less than anything else out there at the moment. an external miner and pool would be nice, nobody desperate to see a GPU miner yet from what I can gather but that too would be good if and when it comes
^^^ my 2 satoshis worth

I have no affiliation to the dev. I do hold a modest amount of NUD and looking to buy some more around 8-10k satoshis
EDIT: reformatted original, sloppy in a rush / red crayon response