I've been "out of the loop" lately and I'd like to ask what specific merits FeatherCoin has. From what I can tell on BTC-e, it's attracted both a lot of hype and a lot of doubt. Why should I mine it? Why should I buy it?
For all the same reasons Litecoin has merit. It's essentially a Litecoin fork, but it targets faster transactions making it more suitable for the internet where people expect purchases take the time required to reload a web page.
It ran into a serious problem when the difficulty shot up due to a massive first wave of interest, but the community supporting it has remained VERY strong. To address this, the developers did a hard fork exactly the same way Bitcoin did one recently in order to introduce a more responsive difficulty retargeting, while being very careful to not allow it to plummet too fast. This, coupled with a massive marketing campaign has lead to a resurgence of interest in the coin, since it is effectively the best of all worlds (the security of bitcoin, the quickness of litecoin), because it continues to innovate and has a community that makes it relevant and is rapidly pushing adoption.
You should buy it because we've already hit the floor with regards to the price, and now that it's relevant due to the hard fork and interest is surging again, the price is going to continue to rise. New services are already in development for it, and it has the technical necessary and the community support to see it continue to gain rapid adoption.
You should mine it for the same reason, AND because there's bountys attached to mining certain blocks in order to help it reach the hard fork and retarget difficulty, AND because in another few days when difficulty drops the amount of coin you can earn will increase. All of this equates to profit. Some people look at the price and go "No, it's not profitable." Those same people are still pissed they didn't buy BTC when it was $13 dollars a coin, because... that's right... it wasn't profitable.
Look at the technical. Look at the community (Feathercoin.com forums just passed 800 registered users and it's been up a month). Look at what's happening with it's adoption. Look at the price over the past 2 days. Look at what's about to happen when we reach the hard fork (hint: more miners). Look at what happens to a coin when more miners jump onto it, and a large community presses for it's rapid adoption. Then decide for yourself what you should do.