This discussion isn't about "investing" or "market cap", yet notice how many people in the replies focus on those aspects.
Maybe because that is the main point of 99% altcoins? If you dig in the history, just a little bit, then it should be enough to burst the bubble, related to "good, old coins, like X or Y". For example, imagine reading those things today, about some new altcoin:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-litecoin-a-lite-version-of-bitcoin-launched-47417Litecoin will come with 150 premined coins
The average Litecoin block takes 2.5 minutes, one quarter of Bitcoin's 10 minutes. So if merchants wanted to be as safe as Bitcoin, they can wait for 4 times the number of Litecoin confirmations as compared to Bitcoin.
means we expect to not see the sort of problem Namecoin encountered; hashing power that leaves more suddenly than it came, causing a high difficulty slog for everyone who stayed
Some previous coins were released without Windows binaries or without source code; we consider this as unfair as it is unsafe.
With block locking at every difficulty change, we were able to avoid any attacks from succeeding. (if there were any)
Or maybe this, if you wonder, how Monero started:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140520010917/http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQMultipool resistant through difficulty retargeting at every block with DarkGravityWave
ASIC-resistance (for as long as there are no X11 ASICs)
Masternode payments which allows for a combined Proof-of-Work / Proof-of-Stake / Proof-of-Service model, where masternodes receive 10% of the mining output.
Try another pool for a while until the DDOS stops.
The monetary base is expanding at a rate of ~3000 to ~7000 coins per day, depending the difficulty.
More coins are produced as an incentive to mine while the hashrate of the network is low and less coins are produced when the hashrate of the network is high.
it would only require the scrypt equivalent of a 300-350 Mhash farm to pull 1 Gigahash in Darkcoin
And then, you go on forum, you read posts like "altcoins are about innovations, not about mining". Then, you open ANN threads and FAQ pages for those altcoins, and read them, seeing exactly, how many paragraphs are specifically about mining, and how many discussions were related strictly into that. Also, you read posts about "good, old altcoins, without any premine", then you explore them, and see exactly, how many of their coins were premined. Then, you read some discussion about a number of confirmations, and, guess what: Litecoin ANN thread, directly says "wait for 4x more confirmations".
When it comes to Monero, there is even more drama: imagine having a new altcoin today, with its ANN thread, changed from altcoin X into Y (here:
Monero ANN thread was changed into Dash). Imagine reading about "the number of created coins, depending on the network difficulty", and think, how it could be easily gamed by miners, who could easily pretend, that "the difficulty was low, so we created a lot of coins". Imagine reading about some altcoin, and about being unable to easily calculate the real network hashrate, because "X hashes in algo A equals Y hashes in algo B".
So, after reading all of that, after digging in the history, and just scratching the surface, are you really sure, that today, we are in a worse situation, than in the past? In case of many altcoins, they had more luck, than knowledge and code. If you check the history, then you notice, that Litecoin is not "just a fork of Bitcoin", but we had "a fork of a fork of a fork thing" long before 2017. Also, in case of Monero, you have more posts about mining algos and hashrate, than about the math, solving the problem with address reuse.