I will say this over and over again until people realize this important point. Coins controlled by corporations will not succeed. A few bucks will be made and the coin will quickly be forgotten. Only grassroot community coins with active development with a REAL purpose and usecase will succeed.
I tend to agree with you there.
Direct your attention to coins that are not owned by corporate interest / ponzi/premine and you will find projects that genuinely believe in this that movement we are apart of.
Not so sure about this one!
People invest in the present. I know some projects are saddled with history and skeletons - but they can be taken over like Europecoin was or they can redeem themselves in the eyes of investors by what they do and how they behave recently. Like NXT etc.
The point is, if they are now great projects and are largely decentralised, I don't think the history makes much difference. If Eth fails. It will be because of the recent Hard Fork (Centralised) nothing to do with the historical instamine/ICO.
Projects are also judged differently across different crypto-epochs. Insta-mines/"ICOs"/Premines are judged very differently now from how they were back in the day (Spoetnik is the exception who proves the rule! Time will tell if he is right - and he often is

). The NXT ICO wouldn't even raise an eyebrow these days.