Personally, I believe that the essence of all altcoins is to create competition, or the appearance of competition, for bitcoin.
Competition for Bitcoin comes from fiat payment processors such as Paypal, Visa and Master and not from these worthless shitcoins. Altcoins are basically like parasites and all they can do is to leech off market cap and user-base from Bitcoin. I am not denying that there are a few altcoins which can be considered as exceptions, such as Ethereum and Monero.