Yeah I'm optimistic too. I'm hoping the difficulty will go down a bit and then the price will rise again due to Bitcoin rising a lot at the moment. When the ASICS's arrive, gpu miners will move to Litecoin though, then the difficulty will probably rise again.
My plan at the moment is to break even with the rig I've mad. Then buy a slightly better one, and have 2 running. Break even with that one and so on.
Overall I'm gonna try and stick with Litecoin for the long haul.
I'm doing the exact same thing. As of tomorrow, I'll be running four 6770's at 240kHash/s each mining litecoin. Right now just two. I've been building my next rig in my head ever since I got my first one built. I'm hoping these ASICs ship soon cause its going to be a free for all in the hardware section of the forum. Will be a great time to pick up gear for next to nothing.
I decided to put solid processors (AMD FX series), at least 8gigs of ram and a stable video card, that runs cool, in my rig. The parts are built buy the same manufacturer (Gigabyte, had some great experiences with their server boards). Its simply a matter of building durable rigs that I can throw at whatever needs mining. Cost an extra $200, but like you, I'm in this for the long haul. What I'm not spending on electricity (its included in the rent) and isn't being spent on maintaining an office (eff that noise) is going directly into rigs.
As for sticking to one crytocurrency or another, I'm undecided. You know how it goes. When your favorite sports team starts to loose there are a million reasons why there losing. That doesn't work so well when dealing with investors. I've found its best not to be biased in these matters.