Just to clarify some of the facts.

Dogecoin uses scrypt like litecoin, but this proof of work was first used by Tenebrix. It also employs the random block reward (vs fixed for litecoin) pioneered by LotteryTickets (which includes the ongoing 10k block reward feature). I'm not exactly sure which repo it was started from, but the wallet client, namely the 1.5 release inherits all Litecoin updates since 0.6.*.

"Pioneered"? Is there any advantage to random rewards, besides novelty?

It makes mining more addictive, which increases the number of people who are willing to mine, even if the financial rewards for doing it drop. Same reason why people by lotto tickets even though it's a net economic negative.

I'd argue that the Dogecoin creators are actually quite brilliant, because they manage to exploit several known cognitive biases in humans to drive adoption. Design for the world as it actually is, not for how you would like it to be.

So, novelty.

It is an incentive to keep around gear that can't normally pay for its electricity. Mining gear that isn't online 24/7 but can come online when the need arises is useful to counter a temporary 51% attack.

Interesting point. So miners would stay online and only mine blocks that they know would be profitable to them?

Presumably there would be a lot of such miners, which would increase competition for those more profitable blocks, which would essentially dampen out the expected value of the rewards. I wonder how the math works out.

99% of dogecoins code originates from the Bitcoin project. The other 1% is Litecoins proof of work and other random garbage including 10k block rewards at the end (originally a bug they didn't want to fix), 1 year for all coins to be generated, random rewards, 500 million transaction limit (originally a bug that they fixed and due to incompetence caused a massive fork) the security and economic implications of which likely hasn't been considered AT ALL, yet people still argue that these arbitrary changes are genius.

The reason they argue that the changes are genius is because they either have been fooled by someone with a stake in dogecoin, or have a stake in dogecoin themselves.