It is still worth to use bitcoins because the value has increased and satoshi's will still be on the same track. Before you are thinking that 0.005 BTC is still a cheap amount of bitcoin but right now the price is high and you may think it's gold and you can now reduce it to lower amount. But if you don't want to do this, you can just simply use alt coins.
I can see no point in using other altcoins. As you said yourself we can reduce our bets to lower amounts in BTC. Using other altcoins may arise confusion since we are used to BTC, I rather wouldn't do that.
In my opinions altcoins are even force. They face an even great amount of volatility and are only good to prevent spending that money on the fees.
And based on the trend, whenever bitcoins fall, so do altcoins. So you essentially end up with great swings.
Yes they are at par with Bitcoin except popularity. They confirms even faster and at lower competitive rates to Bitcoin and so I will use them until Bitcoin scaling issues are fixed probably by August 1.