- we'd avoid causing clones, which reduce the trustworthiness of the altcoin phenomenon
Whatever the other merits of your approach, this one is silly. There are hundreds of altcoin clones, with countless more released every single day. Whether or not your particular pet coin gets cloned or not makes no difference at all to the overall phenomenon.
If your objective is to completely destroy altcoins, yes then that would be the approach.
I would definitely say it makes a world of a difference to the people that have invested in the coin to not have their premium feature released before it reaches its prime and have hundreds of different coin clone the one thing that separate it from all the other coins....