It is surely no harder, and probably much easier, to cut and paste something to make a newer more up to date version of one of these than to cut and paste to make some previously unheard-of coin.
For example i0coin and geistgeld both are crappier code than groupcoin, but are basically identical to groupcoin except for port, name, IRC channel and so on, all the things the cut and paste kiddies cut and paste to make a previously unheard of coin that they would have to pre-mine to equip themselves with a nest-egg of.
Plus all these old coins come equipped with lots and lots of holders who will be eager to jump aboard a newer client that doesn't crash daily (i0coin) nor eat massive amounts of RAM (i0coin, geistgeld) nor use some weird config file and data directory setup (fairbrix). Just like BBQcoin's old time users jumped aboard and brought it back into the limelight, the same can easily happen with other long-established coins that have gone through a long phase of allowing even the smallest miners to easily mine them. (Has anyone helped the small miner more than BBQcoin did? Other than bitcoin itself back in the day?)
(Fairbrix you'd take the newest litecoin, maybe wait for a new one to come out first even, and cut and paste from that.)
Heck, i0coin used to be on bitparking's mmpool, my acount there still has my wallet address for it, clone a client for it from groupcoin and very likely it'll go back onto bitparking, and heck maybe their exchange for it is still sitting waiting for its comeback too..
-MarkM-
The problem is the A sic issue, most of us are gpu miners. So most would go for scrypt.
Then you don't get it I think.
1) Pick up shitloads of the coin really easy because all the big farms consider it beneath their notice.
2) Bring it back into the limielight.
3) Whether its all the massive GPU farms or all the massive botnets or all the massive ASIC farms that jump on it you don't care, you ALREADY GOT YOURS.
TL;DR by the time the ASIC owners jump on it they'll merely be making your stash more valuable. The plan is not to mine it once other people do, the plan is to mine it now while almost no one else is, then only once you have your stash of it do you bring it to the limelight for others to jump all over it due to the new client you put out for it or whatever.
Personally i have been content so far to wait for the merged mining patches to be applied to an up to date bitcoin rather than bother hacking groupcoin to make fixed i0coin and geistgeld simply because the longer that takes the larger a stash i will have when it happens. as long as difficulty is low there is no hurry, in fact the longer it takes the larger the stashes the people mining at the super-low difficulty will have come the time for payday, and maybe also the more actual individual people it will be that will have benefited from all of this by getting in there while the difficulty IS low.
(Basically this is huge opportunity for small miners, because they might have a long long time yet of being able to mine at insanely low difficulty before the big farms jump in and oust them, by which time they will already have their stash and be looking forward to being ousted aka to payday. As I have mentioned before, BBQcoin already showed this in action. It is awesome for the small miners who take advantage of the large miner blindness-to-low-difficulty-chains-not-on-exchanges by getting in there and mining before presence on exchanges causes the big miners' scripts to notice "holy cow that is insane profit I need to rape that"...)
As a small miner what you need are chains that are insanely low difficulty and not on exchanges, because if a coin is not dropped by exchanges when it is low difficulty the scripts looking for most profitable coin will notice and have the big farms jump all over it, driving the difficulty way up until it is not profitable then abandoning it. And not newly launched, because even the most shitty crapcoins of all get jumped on at launch still despite or maybe mostly because everyone knows they are pump and dumps so they all need to pump fast to dump fast.
-MarkM-