You didn't read a word, did you?
Of course I did, but I'm failing to see the
practical difference between simply handing a disproportionately large amount of the coins to a select few controlling entities, and awarding them the coins after a (mostly) trivial amount of mining. You can theorize about the altruistic and right-minded nature of the founders and early adopters (and I'm certainly not saying you're wrong), but those same arguments could just as easily support pre/instamined coins. At the end of the day, they control a significantly larger amount of coins than the amount of work they put into mining them relative to those that come later, regardless of what they choose to do with them.
I should note that I'm not begrudging them the right to do whatever the hell they want with their coin. I've never understood the people that bitch and moan about premined coins, like it was their God-given right to a fair shake for a particular coin. Maxcoin is a great recent example. Personally I just vote with my hash power and go elsewhere if I don't like a coin or its profitability is low. I like Darkcoin and would probably buy into it if I weren't risk averse and tend to avoid speculation.
I've not been here since day one, nor do I have serious hardware to mine - I just mine with my 2 PCs. Having said that, I think there is a tremendous difference between premine/instamine and a launch which says: These are the rules, these are the launch dates, if you want come and mine - and everyone can do that. If some come with more hashrate than others they'll also get more coins.
Now if some people didn't mine it's ok but they can't say that this equates with coins being somehow given to someone. I mean if I were here from the start, for sure I would have taken more coins. I wasn't here, I didn't mine them, so tough luck. Same with bitcoin. I wasn't there in 2009* and thus I'm not a BTC millionaire buying 10.000 btc pizzas with cpu mining. Compared to the cpu mining rates of early bitcoin adopters and what people get today after having to buy ASIC monsters, these were like gods of mining / instaminers... But who says that? Everyone is like "oh man, I wish I was there to mine some".
Even so, when DRK hit the markets, even for someone who hadn't mined, they could get it for like 1/100th of what it now costs directly from the miners and in ample quantity like tens of thousands of DRK. Now, after this second chance, who's to blame again?
* What you said with: "At the end of the day, they control a significantly larger amount of coins than the amount of work they put into mining them relative to those that come later, regardless of what they choose to do with them" can be said for practically every coin that became successful later on, including btc, ltc, etc.