Those of you welcoming GPU mining for LTC/SC have kinda missed the point of why those currently hold the #2/#3 spot in the cryptocurrency world...

I have a decent gaming rig, which I can put to work GPU-mining BTC.  I have no need for more than one decent gaming rig, nor do I have even the faintest excuse to deck it out with quad 6990s.  I do, however, have access to somewhere around twenty i5/i7 cores, all sitting around doing nothing very useful 95% of the time.  I suspect, in that regard, I represent a fairly typical BitCoin enthusiast.

I became interested in mining a second cryptocurrency only because tennebrix (and then others) came up with a way to make CPU mining viable again... I figured, why not put the two or three decent machines I run at home, as well as a couple strays at my shop, onto a useful task instead of simply letting them sit around growing slowly more obsolete by the day?  I suspect I represent a fairly typical LTC/SC enthusiast, in that regard.

Put bluntly, if GPU mining becomes viable for LTC and/or SC, their entire raison d'etre vanishes.  We don't need to decide if we should react if mtrlt releases Reaper13 and it really does work 25x faster on GPUs; We need to decide how to react, and preferably have our changes ready to roll out on the very same day.  And while "do nothing" always counts as an option, in this case it counts as an option that effectively dooms this entire branch of BTC variants.

And yes, before anyone points out the various other problems with BitCoin that various spinoffs address, I understand this doesn't reduce solely to mining hardware issues; But really - It does, so far as most people care.