It is hard to say that Altcoins will be a waste of time.  I find that many of the have unique features that make them unique and interesting.  If you think about the development of almost all other concepts on the web they become long tail.  I am not sure that this will not be the case with Alt coins as well.  Take Mastercoin for example, it has a feature specifically designed to allow anyone to publish a coin and value it to a Bitcoin.  Altcoin may very well be the long tail future of Ecoins.  http://ecoinclub.com/pick-altcoins/