One thing that is still an unknown is what will happen when new bitcoins can not be minted by miners. Nobody knows for sure what will happen then. So in my opinion bitcoin is much of an alt as anything else, in the sense that we can not possibly know if bitcoins are the greatest "pump n dump" of them all so to speak.
I think you will find that the programmers know quite well how it will progress, and you can learn too, it's open source, learn the algorithms. Remember the number of coins per block halves ever 4 years, and the rate of block creation is 10min target, so grab your spreadsheet and work out when 21million coins will be reached.