From the OP:
"1 week smooth linear ramp from 0 to 384, then halving every month (43,200 blks) for the following 5 months and every 2 years thereafter.
All rewards over 192 Verus are time locked to mature at a random block between 129,600 and 1,181,520"

The pre-announce of 15 minutes was to enable a truly fair start where honest miners could get started as early as they saw the announcement, and also ensure that we didn't give hackers enough time to change the code and hit an unestablished chain that hadn't gotten its POS security in place yet with a hash attack. Once POS was established on the chain, it became much harder for a standard hash attack to disrupt the chain's operation than it would be otherwise, not impossible, but much harder.

The ramp from 0 to 384 ensured a fair start where people got days of increasing rewards of unlocked coins that could be used to establish POS security on the chain along with POW, while everyone got a chance to mine the coins equally that would be necessary to secure the chain.

The very large coinbase rewards for both miners and stakers right now and for the next 5 months are to reward early participants and supporters and encourage a larger percentage of stakeholders to be part of the worldwide Verus community.

In order to prevent any chance of pump and dump by anyone and remove that as a concern for all, while still enabling all bootstrapping participants and community members to benefit from that early participation with outsized rewards, we added a mechanism to time lock the largest of the rewards for a period of time over which they would uniformly release. This ensures that they enter the supply with even less impact than the first unlocked mining period to the available supply and encourages all community members who can mine meaningful amounts during this period, many who have larger stakes than we do, to make this project their own to improve as well. We are actually all community members and all get the same time locked coins, as there is zero pre-mine.

We have the same possible rewards and motivations as other community members, though we, the core developers, are working towards our vision for how this evolves that we will share with everyone as soon as we have the paper ready. We are mining and staking coins now, as anyone can, to use to realize that vision and some for our own personal futures. The price isn't that high yet, IMO (I see people trading between each other for about $3, and I've bought as many as I could for about that price personally), but I am obviously biased and not the right person to say how much they are worth in an open market. We are giving random bounties on the Discord for people helping, which are really donations from us as community members, who are also devs and co-miners/stakers, and though we have no obligation, as we mined/staked our coins with our money fairly, we intend to donate most of our shared mining and staking rewards to the Verus project when we can get all details for doing that in place.

Given all that, we had no problem with earning our coins as time locked, and we thought it would prevent P&D from anyone who might happen to get in early and mine/stake quite a lot. We also decided that if anyone didn't want these largest, time-locked coinbases, they could always wait until the rewards were down to 96 and not time locked at all.