If I designed a currency, never would I make the initial distribution so much higher than the long-term.
If the currency starts from zero, there has to be a high initial daily inflation to get it going.
If it does not start from zero, it is called "premine"
That is true but what is the second 6 months debasement for Monero? I will be happy to mea culpa if it is not that high?
Or more specifically is the nominal block reward declining?
As you see the block reward is declining. This is the hallmark of dying pump & dump coin like Bitcoin.
It would be much preferrable to have a small premine (say 1% of 10 year coin supply) used to fund development of the coin than to have say 50% of the 10 year coin supply allocated to what is effectively a premine for the early miners at the expense of the funding and adoption of the coin for the latter years.
Much better to get a smaller premine into the hands of the core developers, than using a scattershot approach to get those coins into their hands as Monero does. The problem with donations is they are subject to politics and design by mob consensus, i.e. leaderless and unfocused.