For the question on why I personally am working on BTC over LTC (even though BTC is in my pipeline 
) is simply because thats how I got into crypto back in 2011-12, whats also more exciting for me is the fact that LTC is an order of magnitude smaller than BTC in terms of network hash power, community etc and thats a plus since the stuff im working on I dont need to sell 100's of thousands of units to have a material impact on the network.
As for the dev side of things, there is a lot of stuff happening in the background that you cant see simply from commits etc. Version 18 of the node is about to be released, and we are pretty close to testing the wimblenimble extension blocks on the network, which will be a huge update and set LTC apart even further from BTC.
) is simply because thats how I got into crypto back in 2011-12, whats also more exciting for me is the fact that LTC is an order of magnitude smaller than BTC in terms of network hash power, community etc and thats a plus since the stuff im working on I dont need to sell 100's of thousands of units to have a material impact on the network. As for the dev side of things, there is a lot of stuff happening in the background that you cant see simply from commits etc. Version 18 of the node is about to be released, and we are pretty close to testing the wimblenimble extension blocks on the network, which will be a huge update and set LTC apart even further from BTC.
I believe you meant why I personally am working on LTC over BTC...
Yeah, I know what you mean but years from now when people ask me why you always buy stuff from Futurebit, Id say becasue Apollo and Moonlander 2 introduced me to crypto!
As for nodes stuff, if they really care to see more of it to provide additional security / faster transaction etc etc, there must be some sort passive income for little guys like us with 1 or 2 Apollo(s).
In my case, as little as being able to pay for my electricity - would do!
Then, of course, there are those who believe In LTC We Trust ... but many of us have not joined the club yet!
I get it, and I think thats one of the few flaws of the BTC/LTC protocol....all the rewards go to miners. % of at least the transactions fees should go to full node operators.
Either way the utility of a full node and running one in your house will be seen in the future, when mass adoption has occurred and the ecosystem is threatened by centralized entities going against the what the users want, but would be powerless when everyone is running a node and a user activated soft fork can keep them in check. Again this is only possible when the vast majority of users are running their own nodes.
This has to be engrained as a norm user practice in crypto, not something a few people do just for fun.