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.
Disagree. You don't pay bounty coins to any developer who is valuing them at their exchange value (you could even have a feature to lock the coins for some months so they can't be spent), rather at their future value. Coins should be
very unprofitable to mine (while driving the hashrate through the roof) and the liquidity on the exchanges should be insufficient to gain whale size (sorry risto). There is a designed way to prevent people from wanting to sell their coins at low prices. Thus the only way you get coins in size is via bounties. Also that should very quickly drive the price through the roof too so the coins will be highly valued based on the intense slope of the price chart and the insufficient volume on the exchanges to satisfy all the whales. Over time the volume on the exchanges will increase as the price also does.
When I wrote "holistic design", I really meant it.
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.
It should be quite clear to astute observers which coins are on such a trajectory.
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.
The developer isn't doing it for near-term income. Any developer with that mindset isn't going to accomplish anything. Which is why Zoid's post was so devastating to the BBR price. He showed lack of confidence in the future price of BBR and then talked about new investments which sounds like moving on to other things or not being firmly commitment. Of course the investments could mean new features for BBR but he didn't clarify.