There's been a strong push by the authors to get FTC accepted for goods/services. Very few alt coins can say that. But yeah, difficulty is about to double yet again. It's still not clear to me why any alt coin has value to be honest.
Difficulty is only going up because it is overvalued and extremely profitable to mine.
If value crashes, so will the network speed. The same could be said for any other ALT currency though really (except for maybe LTC).