The forum doesn't have an awful lot of maximalists now. In fact, if you go by the old post, the maximalist breed wasn't really part of the evolution. Th maximalists you see on crypto-twitter are mostly reactionaries to the blocksize-wars. In some cases, they have outright corporate affiliations; like Samson from Blockstream. The experiments in Alt-coins have been going on for a long time and nobody in their right mind would believe that the financial implications of crypto would be limited only to Bitcoin.

Having said that, the difference as you say is, indeed, about personalities. Bitcoin attracted the best and the brightest in its initial days. Alt-coins on the other hand gave birth to the phenomena of free-loaders and bounty-hunters. The community in Alt-coin is therefore filled to the brim with people from third world countries trying to earn money by any means possible. While it started with simple, genuine freelancers; the stories of people making 100X of their money in freely distributed Alt-coins (Ether for example was a few cents in the ICO) has led to a sort of gold rush where everyone from a shovel guy to the ones with automated bucket excavators are in a race to pump their own coin through marketing (mostly social media manipulation). This has also led to proliferation of copycat projects whose only purpose is to somehow gather seed money. Marketing is provided by the afore-mentioned bounty-hunters looking for a quick flip. The crypto influencers on Youtube and twitter (mostly from first world countries) have taken this to another level. These factors make it extremely difficult to find a genuine project in this wasteland. Its the reason that even though people in the Bitcoin section aren't all maximalist, yet they have suggested to allocate anything from 60-80% of an outright fiat investment into BTC and not Alt/Shit-coins.

Most of this explanation is obvious to the people commenting here but hope this is of some help to you.

Besides this, My personal experience with the DeFi aspect of Alt-coins tells me that they have disruptive potential, at least in the short term (2-3 years). Don't go looking at the plethora of " DeFi farms" springing up everywhere. If you have time before deciding on that investment, I invite you to read a thread that I started about one of these DeFi projects called BarnBridge. You are welcome to ask questions in the thread and join the discord from the link. Ask for me if you come over to discord. There are plenty of people there willing to show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Just make sure not to engage with people asking for money or sending you links via DM. This is a terribly scammy space for newcomers and has every imaginable psy-op designed to part you from your money. For the curious and meticulous though, it is a whole new world.