It was not equal distribution between 73.  There was a 1.5 BTC limit and only 20 people invested the limit, and without any taint analysis we don't know how many of those said 20 were socks.   We also don't know if those 20 people had any crony or nepotism connection with each other.  The other 53 or so people got the scraps.  For people who claim freeloading is an issue in NEM - there's NxT whales with 40+ million coins who haven't logged in months and don't contribute to coding, discussion or even funding.


A distribution of 3000 isn't intended to be a planetary distribution.  We know Aurora tried to give coins to every Icelander and its' value plummeted when the first batch were selling their coins for beer and salted herring.  Ironically, it echoed the original "air drop" that was the privatization voucher of the FSU in the early 1990s (which people promptly sold to door-to-door salesmen and used the proceeds to buy liquor.  

"So most people immediately sold their voucher on the street for about seven dollars. You could get two bottles of cheap vodka for the price of one voucher." are the results you can see on Google.  Some salesmen even traded chocolate snicker bars for vouchers.  A lot of the salesmen who acquired those vouchers later became very rich).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization


The distribution was to weaken the influence of any whales, sockpuppets or incidents of cronyism.  To match the power of an early NxT investor one would have to create 160 sockpuppets in NEM back in January (160 times of bypassing taint analysis which was only revealed later, 160 times of dealing with the anti-spam restrictions on this forum, 160 times of creating socks for a worthless coin, et cetera) and creating 160 socks for a worthless coin was beyond any normal person's patience.