Alt coin mining is a hard game so much puump/dump. I also think less people rent MRR then they use to. A lot tend to use nicehash which pay is low a lot of the time.
You need to look into BTC mining more. It is far from dead, and only dead if high electricity or high vat.
Alt coins are more risky then BTC. It no doubt can make you more money if you get lucky or had some great strategy. When your talking about coins worth a few dollars... a 50 cent raise might be a big margin for it as BTC 50 cent is not much at all.
The problem is gear to mine. Most alt coins that are worth mining are Scrypt. There is just a bunch of old asics besides a few SF100's that made it to public. Compare that to where BTC has a constant stream of new miners being made and developed it is a huge difference in mining.
I'm not sure to many "small" miners will be better off with scrypt gear. What scrypt gear are you mining with you suggest "small" miners use instead of BTC asics?
I thing the value one coin doesn't really say anything. If you got that much mining power, you can probably ( just probably) make equal to the amount of bitcoin you mine or even more. In some cases, solo mining can give you even more income while solo mining bitcoins is quite impossible unless you got a really really really big farm
Show me a SHA256 coin that is constantly better to mine then BTC. I think you either are not a miner, or possibly doing something wrong. Mining SHA altcoins... just does not make sense for almost all. You would be better off mining BTC and buying alt's ins most cases. But I still think BTC is best sha coin long term.
Can you show profits personally from constant mining of alt coins in sha? And you mention some I'm pretty sure you did not try.... burst I looked into mining my HD on 2 TB's a month leaving a big computer on it ran at a loss and made a few bucks a month. You throw out coins but I don't think you have done the ROI or done it personally. But I could be wrong. Please show us your past trading that made it better then BTC on mining.