I think the biggest problem people face when creating new coins is that nobody thinks about things like adoption before hand.
That's why you have a majority of coins that are little more than low value speculative assets. If you could work out the practical application of the coin before hand, and provide easy to use documentation on it, I think you would probably have a better chance of success. What I'm saying is don't just develop a coin. Develop an open source shopping cart system that works with your coin too. Post it. Give it away. Doesn't have to be a shopping cart. It could be anything that gets people spending it. How about a coin with an open catalog in it? Nobody's done that. How about a coin that takes advantage of some as of yet unimplemented bitcoin protocol feature that everyone wants, but nobody has? There's so much room for creativity here, that it's just not funny. My personal feeling is that some kind of real innovation is coming to altcoin wallets soon. Something, anything, needs to happen.