Well it is so simple.  Unfortunately people know this and yet they still behave irrationally - the best thing to do is take advantage of it.  I've been slowly buying up the cheap coins and have way more than I could have mined even though I was mining right from the start of the coin.  Either people have free unlimited electricity and mega hashing power (maybe early ASIC miners) or they love selling at a loss, I suspect it might be the ASIC suppliers "testing" equipment for their customers.  That's why I think it's a losing game for GPU/CPU miners to mine a regular scrypt coin - even with a short mining period.  If you look at Nautilus coin there are a number of 100 MH/s + miners that are making the profitability worthless for regular miners.  I think University Coin can still succeed for us non-ASIC miners but I think it will be the last Scrypt coin that anyone without stacks of cash already will be able to make money on.