Sadly some of the innovations that Mr Spread used for masternodes were trialled and rejected by Darkcoin some time ago.  I think this is why Darkcoin devs wanted him on board...to share the problems they encountered to better harness Mr Spread's abilities. 

There would have been nothing stopping Mr Spread starting his own coin a bit later once he had learned more about the pitfalls of masternodes and masternode payments.  There is a reason why Darkcoin had to come up with the temporary solution of the "reference node" and Mr Spread and Spreadcoin was running straight towards it.