Hey all, super newbie here...

I'm not using Ripple yet and I'm not sure I plan to after reading what people here have to say about it. Yet I'm genuinely curious about it and I've got a question...

Can Ripple be used to buy LTC from BTC without having XRP involved in the process? Or is the "small fee" always paid in XRP?

Also, if I don't really "trust" Ripple to put all my eggs into and have no faith whatsoever in XRP, can I still use Ripple to, say:

- transfer a tiny amount of BTC from Bitstamp to Ripple
- exchange the tiny amount of BTC into another crypto currency at Ripple
- transfer the new cryptocurrency to my wallet(s)

How long would that take?

Basically I take it that my question comes down to: even if I don't trust Ripple much, can it still be useful to convert and move small amounts to/from different crypto currencies? (hence never being exposed too much to Ripple being a scam or getting owned by the feds / DoJ or hacked or anything else that could happen to the centralized dot com server).