What does matter is network difficulty, if coin is hard to get, it will have more value than if coin is easy to get. That simple. No, ifs, ands, or buts.
Not always true. Some coins, which are now dead, ended up with such a high difficulty that it would've taken years to break blocks. Value was $0.
There's a balance to be maintained, but most importantly for a coin like this, is the business front-end regardless of anything else.
"Difficulty over Blocks returned" is just an indicator of how desired a coin is, not always an indice of actual value. It's generally a good indicator.. but still. Difficulty has continued going up on BTC, but value has continud to drop, for example.
Yes, the difference between GPUCoin and all other altcoins of late is that it has an actual business purpose and represents an innovation within the space. Critical to the ongoing success of the coin will be how Jaymes and team execute on the storefront and, in my opinion, international affiliate relationships. There is no need to reinvent the wheel on distribution. If they can sell the idea to any industry players then the idea will benefit from network effect. As long as the return on mining is above break even and miners can dedicate at least a portion of their hashing power for buying new GPU's and the numbers make sense then this will work.
Lots of moving parts and very experimental..... but innovative for sure