Considering this same team created Caishen (CAI) and then abandoned that and switched to CAIx, which is a full PoS coin, I suppose either CAIx has done so well after the switch that they hope to accomplish the same thing with UTC, or else they're just grasping at straws. Here are a few thoughts:

1) The short block times of UTC sounded cool at first, but I'm not at all convinced having more blocks more frequently is a good thing, beyond a certain point. 10 minutes is too long I think most will agree, but I'm of the opinion that even 60 second block targets are too short -- two minutes (give or take) is a better balance, but 20 seconds is just creating a flood of blocks. Could this be part of the cause of the lengthy startup times for the Ultracoin client? Will this get better with the PoS switch?

2) The general attitude in the cryptocurrency world right now is to mine stuff when it's new, in the hope you'll find a few diamonds among all the coal. Since UTC is basically old news, no one is really interested in it, and I don't think changing algos will help at all. UTC will switch to PoS and there may be a short-term price spike, but long-term I suspect it will continue to trend down. In fact, the number of coins that have trended up long-term is pretty small, and breaking away from the pack of garbage alt-coins is almost as much luck as it is something inherent in the coin design.

3) Scrypt-Chacha was an interesting idea as well, but over time the market is concluding that both Scrypt-Jane/Chacha and Scrypt-N are less desirable than X11/X13/X14/X15/etc. SJ was the worst IMO, though, as the N-Factor scaled too quickly at the start, and it hits the point where it's difficult to get running well within a few months. I suspect when the Scrypt-N coins start hitting NF-12 we'll see a lot of complaining once again. If nothing else, moving away from a Scrypt-Jane implementation is a good thing in my opinion, though becoming non-mineable in the process is sort of two steps forward, two steps back.

4) Regarding PoS interest, I've noticed that on some (many?) PoS coins the actual annual interest scales according to some other factor. The result is that coins that claim 15% annual interest can end up with far lower returns than 15% -- or if not many people are staking, the returns can be higher than 15%. Since this same team did CAIx, I checked my interest so far and it does look as though scaling is not happening -- or if it is, it's slightly in my favor. Hopefully this would be true of UTC as well, as if there's one thing that will really upset people it's promising one level of returns and providing something else.

Anyway, I gave up on Ultracoin last week and cashed out. I had mined earlier and in a week or two I had only generated something like 1500 UTC. Right now, I could generate almost that many UTC in a single day. Thankfully the bag I was holding was pretty small.