I hadn't considered that as a motivator, it makes sense; however, they did continue to fund both a nascar and a bobsled after the first halving (where the value did not increase, nor were there political explosions). Why weren't there major political blowups then? I made the point that there would have been less blowups if, instead, they had funded core development (this is the major focus of Monero currently) here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/2akwwx/i_was_having_a_chat_with_moolah_support_when_this/cixfq8k . Perhaps, both the decreasing block reward and lack of core innovation lead to a negative political blowup?

But again, this would lead to the previous points about having an unfocused community. Did they have any type of leadership? I'll have to look that up I guess.

edit: Maybe it's because there was a lack of leadership, and the pull for someone to fill that role became too big? I really don't want to dig all over Dogecoin posts to see if they had leadership, but I'll be doing that now.

another edit: using only Dogecoin as an example (and accepting that decreased block reward (possible value reward) under a leaderless scheme will correlate to catastrophy), we'd expect to have a 'vacuum effect' at least established by the first 'halving' (Monero - April 2016 I think, somewhere around 8.8/block) and then total political failure after the second 'halving' (Monero - April 2017 I think, somewhere around 4.4/block) if the role is not fulfilled.