If I wanted to create my own altcoin, what is the easiest/fastest/cheapest way to do it?
Hire someone to do it for you.
By "create" here I mean a coin I could give to my friends, offer to trade for other altcoins, and store in a wallet.
So basically you just want to make one for yourself and put it on the market so that it's gonna be tradable. This is why we've got a lot of altcoins that don't have a use because the same mindsets of people that make it. They just want to make one so that it can be traded to other altcoins for their own purposes.