Maybe good start is this website which seems to be unbiased and compares different coins in therms of their launch:
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins
But still this is only one website. More research you must do probably.
Wow, that is a ton of information! Thank you for this! This will be my daily reading for this week, whenever I get the chance....
With Monero you can do the same intense investigation (as I and much smarter people have done). You will find that as far as complaints against Monero itself, there are no substantial ones. The launch and all major decisions were handled as fairly as possible by a slowly growing community on top of revolutionary technology. The only *real* criticism I can think of is that no one really knows where the hell this "cryptonote" came from. Despite some people trying to downplay how big of a deal cryptonote is (calling it simple and flawed code in its original form), it is obviously the culmination of a lot of talent and effort.
Ok so I have one question for everyone here including you americanpegasus, I saw this in the link that owm123 posted above:
and
Why is this a good thing? I would think that mining a currency would need to be a very low and steady thing over the course of time to always ensure miners that there will be profit to be made when mining coins... Why would you want to produce 85% of your coins in 4 years? That doesn't make much sense to me.
Going off my recollection from a post from Fluffypony many months ago, I believe it was designed to keep the market price low for entry--which seems to be working well. The tail emission keeps the miners rewarded.