Stay away from low value master node coin which could later scam investors have nothing to do with stay away from all master node project but due to the fact almost all master node coins go from grace to grass, the best way to advice a newbie is to stay away from master node project because newbies will not understand the features the look out for before choosing a master node base project.
Beginners should stay away from all the altcoins not just masternode coins because almost all of them are useless specifically the top 20 altcoins that are the most hyped up and most terrible coins created for pump and dumps.
I understand the hype base of the altcoin market make it hard for investors to understand the altcoin that performs genuinely well in the market but if we are talking about altcoin that included ETH which was another project that introduced new features to the crypto sphere (through the smart contract/dApp scheme) and I consider it not to be among the terrible coins you said.
ETH is not just bad it is the worst because it doesn't have the fundamental characteristics of a cryptocurrency and it was never capable of delivering any of the promises it made: decentralization, immutability, utility, security, cheapness,... none of them exist in ethereum!
You say "smart contracts" but have you ever seen even a single one that has any utility in real world? Of course not because the only usage of Ethereum and its smart contracts is to create useless tokens to raise funds and scam people. So it remains the most useless cryptocurrency of all times.
I understand the ETH team mess up big time by not delivering to their promise but it what it is people make promises and never keep and it just like how we see it in the politician when they are campaign they make empty promises but when they win the vote story change.
However, we need to understand that everything will never be perfect and if Satoshi don't leave the Bitcoin duties to the communities I'm sure some individual will still complain that he's not doing the right thing.
Compare that with bitcoin or even a useless altcoin such as Doge for example, they solve a problem in real world. People can use bitcoin to transfer money in a decentralized way that noone can censor. They tried calling ETH a currency when it was failing back in 2017 but since its fees shot up higher than bitcoin's that scheme also failed.
It not proper to compare Bitcoin with my crypto because Satoshi create the project in a selfless way and no altcoin team can do that but respect the project team (ETH) for introducing something new that's what one of the thing I usually look for a new project.
For now, the 2 main implementations of ETH are DeFi and ICO, which failed imo.
They are not 2, there is only 1 and they keep changing the name while doing the same exact thing: ICO, IEO, STO, DeFi, NFT,...
They create a useless token that has absolutely no connection to anything including the business and people who create it and sell it to people to raise funds. That's all.
Agreed the project and what we're seeing is just a change of name and platform but ETH never introduced ICO, it only introduce smart contract and dApp. If boy of 19years smoke narcotics we can't blame the bar man for because it was not public advertise and it the boy that requested for it on his own.
With that been said, if Satoshi don't want the existence of altcoin he won't have make the Bitcoin source code available to the public for people to emulate it.