The thing is regardless of how active or not those initial investors are/were they still providing something, their initial investment (in BTC), which allowed the project to be developed further. That initial funding is participating in a sense, though indirectly.
If it was my project I'd want to thank those people who initially had faith in me, by making sure they got a return on their investment.
I think we both know it doesn't work this way. People buy into IPO's to dump later at a higher price. It's why NEM called it a "Call to participation" - it was asking people to invest and show interest in it as a community, to participate in this community, to encourage people to work on it's ecosystem and to help prevent people dumping for some quick fiat. Simple "investing" just doesn't cut it anymore. For many people that investment is just a means to an end; to cash out.
It's really not a huge burden on the developer's part either. You give a month to the active community to claim their stake before official launch and then hold the unclaimed ones and distribute them once a month there after. It's not a daunting task or an unreasonable request.
I think the devs have expressed reasons why this isn't the case. Although i wish i could believe you otherwise.
Anyways it's a mute point for me as I'm not on that original list, but I also still want to see the issue dealt with properly as I can't imagine the solutions suggested so far would do anything to help the reputation of NEM in the future.
Learn from NXT's mistakes, that's always been NEM's advantage.
In all fairness i think this is precisely why this discussion has gone on for so long (ironically, there appears to be hardly any hint of it on the NEM forums - where ideally it should be).
Given NEM's development and distribution thus far, it's leagues and bounds away from what NXT ever was.