Premine is good for coin, it helps coin to be afloat on hardtimes.
You don't understand one great thing - premine motivates devs to promote/modify their project. Why should Dev do that for free?
Premine motivates devs to pump and dump, not promote their project. If they created a shitcoin on a generator website, premined it and it failed, well they don't have anything to lose. If it succeeded after one faucet and one giveaway he will be happy to dump all his coins and move to a villa on a seashore.
Investment motivates devs to promote/modify their project. If they bought coins from early miners for giveaways, bounties and etc., only then they are motivated to promote their project.
Much more effective motivation.There is no problem with a pre-mine, as long as the address is transparent and the bounties are rewarded to encourage growth. Because of the way most alt-coins explain their pre-mines, people just assume they are kept by the devs ready for a dump when it hits an exchange. This can be true, but if the pre-mine is transparent and all of the paid bounties can be seen, then the infrastructure of the coin is developed by the community thus increasing the coins value. Its a win-win situation.
One coin that has adopted this method and impressed me with their transparency is DigiByte -
http://digibyte.co/pre-mine-accountsTransparency doesn't help. They still own the keys for pre-mined accounts. Nobody can stop them from legitimately and transparently spending part of pre-mine on giveaways, bounties and then dump everything else once the price is good enough.
Bottom line: premined coins are sneaky way to make devs rich, and it can't be considered good for coin. And I will repeat: giveaways, faucets and bounties can be organized by investment of the developer. They should buy their marketing. There is no other field in human relations where the advertisement is free. Neither should it be here. People open their websites, they have to spend their $$ for getting people to know their business.