The timing is very important and like what you said, if you can place your position or your investment from the first wave of hype, the amount of potential profits that you can gain is really high. But, if the timing was wrong the chance that you are risking a huge amount of your investment is always there to follow, pump and dump will put you in a risky place so it's really your good knowledge that will save your ass not to lose a lot of money in kind of investment that you are just following the hypes.
You need to keep doing your research and have a big patience not to allow yourself being entice by the developers, which can be a scammer after.
You are wise, we should not be blind holders of any coin or token, while the case of tokens is even worse because many of them are considered irrelevant after a while due to the manner they behave. This is after high promises and hope on how they will behave. I have been the victim of many tokens in the past, but I am now wise especially when the tokens are still new. I give them time to allow proper study and speculation on them, yet most of them always disappoint me, while some will perform beyond expectation, but will later still disappoint.
There are too many people who think that it would be wise to invest into something that would bring them a good return but they just fall in love with these projects and end up being unhappy about it. It's clear that we shouldn't be really worried about crypto like it is something we should be fans of, it should be something that works for us, not the other way around.
There are too many projects, including in the casino world, where the investors working for the project to get it bigger, and shill it and raid for it and so forth just to get it higher. I am sorry but if a project expects anything more than my money, then it is not a good project.