Bitcoin is not the only one to blame for the price of alts (and by alts I mean not another country, animal or color coin). Market cap has shrinked with more than $10B since January and we have about 500 more coins. Yes, BTC has major influence in that, but the real fault imo are the greedy developers who launched 10s of coins.
I agree, lots of new coin launches take away attention and liquidity, but the key thing here is most coins dont last more than few weeks tops. We are going strong almost 3 months later. What gives me confidence and inspires me to develop for Viacoin is that it is well known outside of the new-coin-a-day economy. When I went to an Ethereum meetup in London spoke with a dev, he'd heard of it. I met lots of mainstream bitcoin people during the conference time too and they had also heard of Viacoin. So it just takes time to get differentiated and for the message to filter out. Viacoin has definitely gotten distinguished. There have been quite a few posts on r/reddit that made it to the first page that involve viacoin as the topic... you get the picture.
Regarding BTC - I personally think Bitcoin wont see a long term trend change until NYDFS publish their new rules. Comment will finish on 21st October, then it could still be a few months before they publish or make it clear what their regs will cover. Until that happens, the market cant price it in what it doesnt know and uncertainty equals bear. Once there is certainty again it will clear the way. I've also noticed that when there is high downwards volatility in bitcoin, alt volume shrinks. When it stables up again, alt volumes pick up.
Anyway, my opinions probably dont count for much, and I'm certainly not commenting on viacoin price, just my overall impressions of factors that affect alts and btc in general.
20k story now can be called: Mission Impossible 5 - Viacoin's story 
