I'm curious why you ask which features are important to the crypto community. In my view, the focus on miners is probably doing a lot to hold back real innovation. I view cryptocurrencies as being kind of like languages, in that no matter how good they are technically, their value/utility is really tied to the number of people who can be convinced to use them. What I see in the alt-coin world is a bunch of people trying to further refine Esperanto while English (bitcoin) continues its dominance. I do mine them, but only because some people are willing to trade BTC for them.
The world would be quite boring if everyone spoke english and had the same culture, wouldn't it?
That's the relevance of altcoins; each community which has different values than the others need to have their own currency, whose economic worth reflects the magnitude of trust that each member of the community has towards each-other. That is of much help for a community to grow and realise their goals.
Hence the relevance of many altcoins, with different purpose and often different technologies.