I understand OP is a busy man, but this is biased and researched properly.
The classical altcoins do not offer anything relative to Bitcoin, except maybe a different hashing algorithm. An important thing to remember is that there is no long-term market niche for two coins with the same algo. The hashing power of the larger coin is constantly threatening to destroy the smaller one. Even if that does not happen, there are network effects in play that favor the larger coin and suppress the smaller.
There's at least several features in few of the alts which offer something interesting that Bitcoin is lacking.
However you look at it, if there is an interesting feature worth exploring and further development - that's what should be done, from many angles - first rule of progress in any technology.
There's more, but I just stopped on this.
Nothing to be taken away from Bitcoin - it is and it'll be cryptographic currencies king for some years to come, but progress has to be made.
His point was that some of the new generation alternative coins are offering quite a bit more than Bitcoin (Monero) whereas the old first generation alt's offered very little in the way of innovation.
I liked PPC, but the inflation mechanism only favours people who can hold coins still for 30 days, thus if this coin were to take off, people that lived paycheck to paycheck would never get interest and the rich would, eventually this dilutes the poor to favour the rich.
Huntercoin is interesting but the game isn't fun in a game sense, it's slow and has bots that just sit in one place.
What other coin are you talking about from the first generation that had a lot of innovation?