If it was there for the purpose of giving someone an advantage, it really isn't the same thing. Ideally, optimization would not be necessary, because a crippled hash wouldn't be used.
Consider that Monero was launched by thankful_for_today, and inherited the crippled hash function from Bytecoin. None of the 7 members of the Monero core team were involved in the launch, nor did any of us mine it right away.
I looked back at my IRC logs - othe asked me on 2014-04-26 if I'd heard of it, over a week after it had launched. Here's a typical example of our early conversations:
[2014-04-26T14:07:42+0200] cant get boost installed here > 1.5.3
[2014-04-26T14:07:56+0200] I've gotten boost 1.55 installed
[2014-04-26T14:07:58+0200] the problem is
[2014-04-26T14:08:06+0200] when it tries to statically link the executables
[2014-04-26T14:08:12+0200] it isn't linking the boost libs
[2014-04-26T14:13:59+0200] [ 46%] Building CXX object src/CMakeFiles/wallet.dir/wallet/wallet_rpc_server.cpp.o Linking CXX static library libwallet
[2014-04-26T14:14:01+0200] that one?
[2014-04-26T14:14:12+0200] no after that
[2014-04-26T14:14:20+0200] Linking CXX executable simplewallet
[2014-04-26T14:14:22+0200] all of those
[2014-04-26T14:14:25+0200] Linking CXX executable bitmonerod
We couldn't even get it to run properly, much less mine with any sort of magic miner! That very day tacotime, NoodleDoodle, othe, and myself, started talking about it and discussing things like if it could (conceptually) merge-mine with Bitcoin clones and so on (even though othe and I were still struggling to get it to work). The rest, as they say, is history.