I don't mind high risk if there's high reward. Right now mining profitability largely depends on coins value increase. If the price stays same and difficulty increases, ROI is nearing 2 years, which is not that appealing, considering the equipment might not live much longer. So profit largely depends on coins value increase, which in turn means buying the coin is pretty much as profitable as mining. The difference is lack of elbow grease and no risk of some huge turd hitting the fan (like 3.8 million GPU-s migrating to your favourite coins). Of course this is just my opinion, I created this thread because I thought maybe I'm missing something and my grim analysis is flawed...