I kinda realized how pointless most alt coins are when I realized that all I cared about was their BTC value. To be honest, it seems like the main reason alt coins get popular is due to how they tend to be (hopefully) profitable to mine, compared to BTC who is now deep into ASIC land in terms of mining, for actual security this is actually a good thing as it makes the BTC network very hard to 51% attack, but the average miner can't ever hope to get a profit. People might find it a controversial opinion but... IMO this makes bitcoin to have a safe and secure future compared to most altcoins.
If you premine/instamine all the coins, then you can give them out to alot more people. You couple this idea with increased volume and the psychology of the big numbers makes a mighty fine motivator for shill creation.
If we were to go back just a year ago most of the coins being pumped would be chastised off the forums. The new crypto users are getting more and more naive.. perhaps they are getting younger. They are obviously getting more greedy and the color of their hats are going from a light grey to near black.