Blake based coins are usually mined better with fpga, so it's unlikely that gpus can be profitable. Unless the algorithm is new or weird (like pentablake).
Why? at the moment it seems that decred is decetly profitable, at least in the short term. A better optimized miner for nvidia would make it better than zcash.
Pallas looks at things very long term. There are probably people with FPGAs already on Decred, but they can only expand so fast so hard... Just because they exist doesn't make GPU mining obsolete.
Pascalcoin pool miner would still be neat.
There have been for months, just like on sia, vcash and now pascal as well.
Of course if you do your math and find it's profitable, you'd better do it, but don't count or invest on it.
Mining in general is always chasing the next newest thing. Even x11 was eventually violated by ASICs. In between coins are destroyed by FPGAs and even normal GPU coins are eventually pushed split with highly optimized private miners.
There really is no 'safe' area. About the safest thing to have come along is Ethereum, which can't really be optimized or improved at all. I'm sure even Equihash has private miners operating on it now that are 20-30% faster then pub miners (including fee based ones). It's like the myth of sisyphus where he has to roll a bolder up a hill in hell for all eternity.
You can try to get your own private developers... I've tried offering jobs to individuals in PMs, I try to offering them publicly and raise awareness of markets that can be tapped into, which usually aren't tapped. I look for niche markets and monitor them all the time and never talk about them in threads. I try to outpace others with lending, creativity in my mining setups, and investment opportunities.
It's a never ending battle and struggle to stay ahead. I've already been strangled by cryptos, that happened at the end of '14 when there was nothing profitable for AMD... It can happen again. I'm still in cryptos though... as are you.
Pascal might be FPGA bait... but right now it's profitable and the miners DEFINITELY can be improved. Not just the stability, usability, and the protocol (stratum), but also performance can vastly be improved. I'm not super into coding and even I can figure that out based on GPU utilization and TDPs. Software development, specifically for miners moves a LOT faster then FPGA development, even if FPGAs and eventually ASICs catch up... That's a ways off and when that happens, we move onto something else. It's part of the cycle.