You say IOTA was considerably pre-mined, and there is a huge number of coins, but this is not quite right.
As I understand it, it was 100% pre-mined as there arn't any miners. All the IOTA tokens exist from the begining, and there will be no inflation. Pre-mining is what some scam coins do, but the IOTA devs were open from the beginning that it would work this way.
2779530283277761 is the total number of IOTA tokens that exist, but this is similar to the number of bitcoin satoshis that exist. IOTA wants to do micro-transactions, and so a large circulation of tokens is needed.
I think the smallest amount of IOTA you can have is 1, fractions aren't possible. Does anyone know if this is the case?
Well, people are saying that a lot of the coins were given to the developers to pay them out, this was when the price was cheap. I won't go into it on the comments but take a look at this: