Most of these coins are disappointing. They make big promises and don't deliver. This coin is probably no different. It'll keep hovering in the 24K sat range for years before it goes up in price. The same idiots with every coin will tell you to hold the coin while it clearly is not making any money for anyone.
Frankly, most of us don't give a flying fuck about the coin itself. We want the price to go up. I'm not in this to care about the coins technology. Most of these coins are piles of garbage and their only function is make me money, that's it. I'm not going to hold a coin very long if it doesn't make me money. This whole concept of mass adoption is a farce. That won't happen for years so why even bring that up.
Investors want to make money. Or more specifically, they want to sell their investment to someone else at a higher price than they themselves paid for it. It would be irresponsible to oneself to be an investor in a cryptocurrency and not "care about the coins technology". There's one simple reason for this: scarcity mechanisms. Some coins have them, some coins don't. Scarcity is what drives the price of a coin up or down, and it is our job as investors to understand what induces scarcity (if we want to take this job seriously). These tend to fall into two camps: speculation induced and utility induced. The speculative side of things is pretty easy to understand: people buy in thinking it will go up (for whatever reason), this in turn inducing scarcity. The utility side of things is a little more involved, but tends to be pretty easy to break down.
The Stratis Platform incorporates scarcity inducing mechanisms into pretty much every service available in the suite of features which make it up (excluding the DLT, which has no direct impact on the scarcity of Strat). I wrote this FAQ a while back in an attempt to give investors one easy place to learn about these scarcity mechanisms and why they are important to investors:
https://stratisfaq.com/. Some of the info is out of date and there are new scarcity considerations in place, what with the sidechain masternodes and other more recent developments. However, the bulk of the info is still absolutely relevant.
Masternodes are a gimmick that mean nothing. Give the investors something to make the price go up, because its all about making money. We're not part of the development team and have no vested interest in this coin other than to make money. Do something to make its price go up. Launch a partnership with a major bank , or develop some outstanding smart contracts. Tell us it's the fastest coin on the market. Something to make people want to invest in it. Masternodes are not going to do anything to move the price. Do something important !!!!
Check out the scarcity sections of the FAQ:
https://stratisfaq.com/the-value-of-cryptocurrencies/#what_changes_a_cryptocurrencys_value_over_time. As you say, you're not "part of the development team and have no vested interest in this coin other than to make money", and as such it is your responsibility to yourself to understand how the technology impacts the price and why (tl;dr mechanisms built into the tech induce scarcity, scarcity in turn informs the price of a thing because availability vs demand).
Hopefully those FAQ sections will help, and if there's anything that's not clear or you feel is incorrect, feel free to ask any questions or give any criticisms.
Here's where you're going wrong with the Masternodes:
"Masternodes are a gimmick". Sidechains are the principle feature of the Stratis Platform and will be the basic second layer for the whole ecosystem, enabling non-trivial applications and scaling. These Masternodes enable the sidechains to be non-centralised, something which we all know is important in crypto. They're not a gimmick; the Masternodes are a solution to a problem.
"Masternodes ... mean nothing". Like you said, the goal of an investor is to make money. One common way of doing this is to sell your investment to someone else at a higher price than you paid for it. If you want to be a good investor, then you need to understand what will make the price of your investment go up (see the scarcity section of the FAQ above). These Masternodes directly play into the coin economics of Strat in two ways. 1) they induce scarcity by locking Strat out of supply through their collateral requirements and 2) they receive an income, incentivising operation of Masternodes, driving demand for the operation of Masternodes, this in turn bringing demand-induced scarcity to Strat.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should only look to the built in scarcity-inducing mechanisms in the tech of Stratis Platform to push up the price! As you imply, big news induces scarcity too! Speculation is a powerful scarcity driver and definitely the easiest concept to grasp: "big news makes the price go up!", without even having to go into how news makes the price go up (hint: demand-induced scarcity driven by speculation). Fortunately, building out the Masternodes wasn't done at the cost of some big partnership, or any other piece of news that you are after. There isn't someone at Stratis Group Ltd going "OK guys, we've got to choose between delivering Masternodes and making a partnership with a big bank, since for some reason the two are mutually exclusive...".