Great article Tinashe. You did a really thorough job highlighting all the main points. I hadn't even really considered the possibility of funneling the ICO proceeds back into the ICO.
I read a post awhile back, probably by @dan or @eos or someone involved, that laid out the game-theory reasons for doing the ICO over a year. They were actually very good. The idea was that everyone would get a fair shot at investing in the ICO, and the lengthy time would provide a more stable, average, and fair price for everyone. On top of that, since the project wasn't running yet, having all the funding at once was unnecessary (no liquidity problems), therefore extending the sale further to get the maximum dispersal was best.
It was a really good post, it used the analogy of someone finding an asteroid made of gold and minting his own new gold coin (or something close to that), and what would be the best way to distribute the new coin the widest, and fairest, while still getting fair value for the creator?
Anyway, I was convinced that their ICO structure was an experiment in free-market "fairness". I'm not able to participate though.
I would say the most concerning item above would normally be that the token comes with no guarantee of anything. You've got to trust the team in this case, but perhaps that's true of most alt-coins now.
Please note that this article is an almost verbatim transcript of someone else's video:
So basically this person "Tinashe" just stole someone else's work.