There is nothing wrong with a premine, it is only the intentions and qualities of the founding developer that make the difference.
Without a premine, only a rich developer can buy and mine his own coins. So only rich people should create coins?
I'm not making a moral judgement just an observation of the pragmatics of it.
You simply can't extract enough money very quickly to cover the capital costs of a significant project. You
can extract enough money to make a pump-and-dump worthwhile, especially if you streamline and industrialize the process to minimize costs, as some have done. Or at least you could six months ago. The market may be sorting that out, but not in a way that helps legitimate developers.
You can premine and hold with a low profile as you say, but that doesn't help support yourself during the development period. So if you aren't at least rich enough to support yourself, your team, and whatever other costs the project may incur, or you haven't raised capital from someone who is rich enough to sponsor it, you are pretty screwed.
But as you say, it is all relative. If you can live on 500 USD/month then Zoidberg's 750 USD/month is just fine (as long as other costs don't exceed 250 USD/month of course). That limits the potential participants though.