See, the first thing I need to underline here, is the fact, that this isn't just a simple airdrop. Steem users are now an integral part of the Byteball ecosystem. We needed the reputation level, how flawed it might be, as a way to allow ICO issuers, merchants, webshops, bot creators etc. to provide discounts and bonuses to a limited set of users. Users' attestations are posted to the DAG (yes, it's not a blockchain as you mentioned) and it allows developers to provide special services to Steem users.
One thing I can honstly say we didn't foresee, was the internal debate this caused in the Steem community. We definitely had no intention to bring focus to what some apparently believe is a broken system.
Whether or not you believe we knowingly set out to do things this way, I can just say, that to a platform allowing users to build and expand on it just like Steem, we definitely got some attention from developers swooping in to take advantage of things.
One final word on all this would have to be, that the network issues we experienced last weekend, was definitely not planned for! It caused all sorts of problems both to users and to us monitoring the campaign. That's definitely a lesson we've learned for the next campaigns :)