AGS was a donation from individuals who believe in the project and its goal of making an open source toolkit that enables the open source movement to build ethical, automatically diversified investment stake in their own Bitcoin-based ecosystem.  Bitcoin's source code (or slight offshoots) has given the ability to create DACs that function as a primary currency. Bitshares comes in and says "hey, if you really want to give value to your coin's holders...honor them by developing industries in your coin's ecosystem and sharedrop to them for being loyal."  "Oh, btw, here is a toolkit that will make your DACs have TITAN and DPOS, so you can protect your users' privacy and enable community members to vote in delegates that help fund infrastructure..."

Of course AGS holders hope that those who use the bitshares toolkit will honor them for risking their hard-earned cash to help finance the construction of such a wonderful tool (as opposed to participating in the multiple Pump and Dumps for which their funds could have been used).  I personally was one of those people, so if I get a snapshot of a DAC developed that also honors AGS, then I'll definitely smile about it, but even if not, I at least know my investment will help protect noobies from buying Sh!tcoins whose devs/miners only want to virally pump and dump on them.  That is payment enough