I mined the first few blocks of VTC, on my laptop CPU.. solo..
so didn't feel like an instamine to me.
I wasn't solo mining, but I still mined quite a few vtc back in january.
Vertcoin seems to be one of the most fairly distributed major altcoins out there. Check out
http://bitinfocharts.com/ and look at the percentage of coins owned by the top 100 addresses; vtc is the only one with a market cap of $5M that is under 40%, and most are over 50%.