Vertcoin is a little older than Execoin and has more places you can actually spend it.  Granted, that's a chicken-and-egg problem, since merchants generally don't want to deal with coins with low exchange volumes.  Darkcoin uses a different mining algorithm and is innovative in its anonymous transaction technology.  The only thing Execoin brings to the table today is an advantage for miners to get in early before the ASICs start killing Scrypt profitability.  This isn't a bad thing, it just means patience and a little bit of faith is required.

You suggest Execoin needs to do something to attract more people, presumably miners, merchants and investors.  How does making the coin more rare make it more accessible and appealing to these people?  I really hate bringing up Dogecoin over and over again, but it clearly demonstrates that a large mining reward and insanely high inflation can't kill a coin if people are crazy in love with it.

While it was nice to see Execoin up on top of the profitability charts on Coinwarz, that really just attracted miners who wanted to immediately dump their earnings for BTC.  Execoin is better off without those miners.  Coinwarz is littered with coins that are barely hanging on because the developers believed "more rare = more value" and it just doesn't work like that.  We need demand, enthusiasm and EXEcitement to bring the hashrate and the value to the moon.