ZEC has terrible profitability compared to say BTX,XVG,LUX, etc.. that is what keeps me from mining ZEC direct.
XVG,LUX, etc. are questionable to hold because they may be worthless. Not as enthusiastic about them as I once was and hence why I am looking at alternate courses of action here..
ZCoin has a rich list and it's almost as bad as ZEC to mine. High difficulty low reward etc..
Well I guess the real question is what is OP looking for? He wasn't very specific. On one hand it sounds like he wants to mine a coin with good long term prospects and the best for privacy, on the other, he obviously doesn't want to mine something that will be cheaper to buy than to mine. Of course that is always the million dollar question with mining; Do you mine what is most profitable at that minute? Or do you sacrifice some profit now for the potential of greater profit later.
If we are talking about most profitable right now, it will be zclassic (because of the upcoming fork) or zencash. If you are talking about the best privacy coin, then Monero is the defacto, but saying its the best is like saying bitcoin is the best. There are better cryptos out there than bitcoin but its what has widespread adoption and value. As for Zcoin, their richlist is by design. Its their belief that having an auditable blockchain will catch security breaches and bugs. With Zcash it is impossible to know what is going on:
https://z.cash/blog/fixing-zcash-vulns.htmlIn short, best long term potential: Zcoin. Current algo cannot be mined by Nicehash, and they are switching to a new, never before used algo soon. Also their current algo has extremely low energy usage and heat output. You can mine on 6 cards without any real extra heat.
Best short term potential : Shield (XSH). Forked from Verge, but will be implementing more rich features such as PoS Casper, masternodes, smart contracts, and sharding. Currently at 12 cents a coin, the potential is huge.
Best potential for privacy-oriented coin: Intsense (ITNS). Not a privacy coin per se, but will be used to pay for decentralized VPN service. Developers are professional with very detailed monthly progress statements. Cryptonight is the algo. I currently mine this with my cpu with my GPUs mine XSH. Currently at 3.8 cents per coin. Even with the low price this is the most profitable cryptonight coin right now, so its a good coin to hold. Even if it only goes to 10 cents, you have almost tripled your money.