Early or not, the fact that Pnosker is in the trollbox cheering up day traders says a lot about the mentality and moral of the lead developer. The same moral had associated vericoin with the scammer WizRig. Anyway, it is not very classy that the lead developer of a coin is active, create hype and cheer up potential buyers at an exchange. You would never seen that from well respected devs like btcdrak.
If this mentality of Pnosker, the lead developer would known by potential investors at the time - the very same people who come here these days to tell us about money lost with VRC and that they are very disappointed - then many investors would never ever buy VRC.
I'd like to clarify that there is no "lead" developer for VeriCoin. Doug, David, and I are all working on various things. If you remember, in the beginning I was the only public one, so maybe people considered me the "lead." But now Doug, David, and I are all publicly known. And so there is no "lead" face anymore. I went to the trollbox because people kept asking me to on IRC. Nobody has asked me to in months now. Same with the #Cryptomarkets IRC channel.