I was there when the blocks started spitting out 400,000 coin rewards. There were a handful of miners mining, and they got a LOT of the coins. Many millions of those coins were sold at very cheap prices (3-10 Sat) on Bittrex as miners dumped coins. The fork then caused issues as the bad nodes from the wallets of completely oblivious people were kept open and were confusing the network. People were freaking out and wondering what the hell was happening, and it was chaos on the boards. There was a dedicated community of coders and miners and such hanging out in IRC trying to fix all the issues.
Since then, the wallet has been fixed, at least as far as I am concerned (no problems since i started using new wallet and avoid bad nodes). The coin shot up on the Mintpal voting boards and brought renewed interest. The dev has been way more present here on the boards of late, and things have been working much better. There are bad nodes still causing issues for people with bad nodes in their Conf files. Luckily, that issue is known, and is addressed when brought up here on the boards.
So there was no instamine. The miners mined for several days until the fix could be made so that the fork would work. So when the decision came to either re-launch the coin (and piss off a LOT of people) or to fork, they chose to fork, which caused more issues.
We are now coming OUT of the tailspin and are on an upward trend. For people like me, who were present and involved during the "dark days", the huge coding issue made it possible to buy many more coins that we otherwise would have been able to afford (the old price was ~200 sat pre-problems).
So in essence, due to the issues, the coins were released in large numbers very suddenly in to the market. They were bought up, and now people are itching to sell them at the much higher prices. We are seeing some dumpage, but not much. This tells me the first day on Mintpal could be pretty scary. We shall see how the coin fares when the large holders decide to exit, and how quickly.
If the fork issues can be for the large part resolved (there may always be one bad node out there), and the charity aspect gets implemented, and the marketing is done right, then the coin has a lot of possibility.
Hope the summarized history helps some people avoid going through dozens of pages from over a month ago.