Can understand BTC -> Brownie, but can't you do BTS -> Brownie on chain? Though I guess until 2.0 traversing the order book properly will retain a certain skill!
blockchain_market_list_bids BROWNIE.PTS BTS
Yes, we could have placed asks on the distributed exchange to sell them as BTS, but that does "lock them up", so they wouldn't be available to BTC buyers at the same time, and we have a fairly limited supply. By selling them thru BlockTrades, we're open to purchasers with any currency we've provided a pairing for.
More importantly, this is really more of a promotional offering to attract people to make a purchase through our site, rather than a desire to sell the brownie points. Naturally, we could have just offered to sell them to BTC holders, but we didn't think this would be fair to BTS holders.