Altcoins are anything but independant of BTC. The recent slump is to be expected when BTC falls upon hard times in the public eye - less speculators with faith in BTC means even less speculators buying up cheap altcoins. Scrypt ASICs from gridseed are also playing part, very likely.
If your power is expensive, scrypt mining with GPUs may soon be (or already be) unprofitable for you. Such is reality.
My personal goal is to get to 25% ROI, at which point I feel "safe". I feel from that point on, I can at least break-even on selling parts and what not, and all my rigs were just a fun hobby. Hard to say of course, since the market would be flooded with people selling off their gear, but we'll see just how much longer GPU mining can hold out for.
I think a big step forward would be for multipool's to stop coin dumping and attempt more long-term profitability methods. What those are, I don't know, but we're killing coin values.
Don't worry about Gridseed's too much: Worry about 2nd generation when they start coming.