Well exactly the way you said it... “depends on when you went in”, and with this logic I can argue even today in 2021 Bitcoin isn’t the best performing. Right?
That’s why when we say BTC > ETH (or any other shitcoin) we are only talking about the long term. Yes we can earn short term profit and make it a way to acquire more bitcoins but at end Bitcoin is the only store of value.
In general I agree with what you say, however, if you went in at the beginning or the start of Ethereum, I supposed that should qualify as "long term". It has different uses. But if you went in at almost any few months or years after the ICO, then yeah, that kind of long term not from the start wouldn't make as much profit.
Short term can go either way for any shitcoin.
I keep an open mind about the bigger coins and some of their tokens. Most of them are probably either not worth looking at unless you know some good references that are in that particular space, but even then they are all risky bets.
I'd go in for the tech, and this holds true, for example, for some use cases or features, such as privacy, or particular smart contracts or something else. When BTC started, in the first couple of years, most everyone was in for the tech, and had random people sending thousands of BTC to each other and 5 from the faucet and what would seem like absurd amounts.. 10k for pizza and all that. This is where amounts below $100 per whole BTC coin doesn't make much sense to include in calculations since it was not really that much valued yet, from an earlier discussion in this thread.