And exactly because the only reference point was PAL he decided to kick things off for his tribe, by airdropping everyone LEO tokens based on the PAL tokens they had staked to 1:1 ratio.

I remember now. A lot of people back then dumped their tribe token airdrops immediately because they were Steem maximalists and didn't take the tribe tokens seriously at all. Obviously in hindsight this was a mistake, but I can't really blame them because back then everyone was waiting for the SMTs hype train to arrive.