I think the choice of this style of emission was to make a few possibly miffed individuals on bitcointalk happy that they had access to the emission from the genesis block, even if not all of them knew about it. Other than that, I think the speedy emission was to prevent the coins from ending up in botnets hands and subvert the entire process of botnets in general. Maybe dNote or someone else can explain it better?

Personally I see this more like a PoS coin with a PoW distribution, only it's a PoS coin without staking. I don't think you can have a PoS system due to how CryptoNote is designed, so this is what we have. That's the best benign answer I could come up with for myself though, in order to get past economic details and observe the technical ones.

I, for one, am extremely interested in this messaging system. I found the white paper a bit confusing, does anyone with a good grasp on how the messaging system works wish to explain how it works in a slightly easier to understand language than the whitepaper?