But you can only mine a significant amount of coins with ASIC miners, and they normally do never achieve ROI (late shipping, increase in difficulty, ...).
Agreed. Luckily I got my 30GH BFL ASIC miner barely in time (Oct 2013) to mine enough to pay for it, even at today's prices, before it became almost totally obsolete. Fuck BFL. I hope they all rot in jail.
I was fortunate that I bought mine with fiat (Paypal) the previous February while trying to find a way to buy bitcoins. If I'd paid in Bitcoin, I'd be really pissed off.
As for Scrypt ASICs making LTC and others unprofitable to mine, perhaps there's still a ray of hope in multi-algorithm alts like Ethereum or Darkcoin.