is it worth the effort?
it depends on what you are calling "worth"!
for example you can see that Satoshi Nakamoto put a huge amount of work in creating bitcoin from (nearly) scratch. nearly because the idea was out there and there were some tiny tests done already but not a full blown system like bitcoin.
was it worth the effort? Satoshi created a worldwide decentralized payment system aka a currency that did not exist before.
is it worth the effort for you to do the same?
what do you want? if it is to get rich, then probably not because you can get rich by creating some shitcoin fork of bitcoin and calling it bitcoin 2.0 and premine it a lot and dump it on the market.
Creating shitcoin is not an option. I just see no point in forking Bitcoin and do this kind of "innovations", like changing algo to another X12345 or even Equihash. Someone can do good money on this, i think, but my goal is to have a platform, not a currency. So that I can store some specific kind of data on it's blockchain and run some specific dapps, with my programming language of choice.
So I would define "worth" as having, in the long run, sustainable platform for my applications, not depending on 3rd parties in regards of the language it is written in, transactions fees, possible project abandonments or quality of code I'm not happy with.