Altcoins are currently a get rich quick scheme: the early adopters (and presumably also the creators) are able to mine significant amounts of coin. Whether the difficult increment makes it unfair or not, these early adopters will get 1'000s if not 10'000s or 100'000s of coins, and if they hoard them all will then hold significations shares of total coin in circulation. Then they do their best to raise interest in the coin, find people willing to pay for them (with BTC, LTC, etc.) and finally, if the coin gains enough popularity, dump their coin on an exchange like BTC-e. Some savvy traders were able to make a bit of money this way with Feathercoin and Chinacoin: both started selling artificially high when the exchange first started trading them. If you're able to conclude the first sell orders, you're then able to dump 1'000s of those altcoins (that took you a few hours to mine) for several $100 worth of BTC.