Then it was a fundamental misconception about proof-of-work-based consensus blockchain systems that tripped you up. None of Litecoin's tweaks (conf time, supply, mining alg) offer any real benefit over bitcoin. They're all just irrelevant tradeoffs. Faster confs yield a chain that re-orgs more, so you need more confs to be as secure; supply magnitude is not relevant at all given divisibility; and mining algs all converge to the same long-run least-cost-producer dynamics.

Forgive me, but Litecoin was attractive to a lot of people who didn't really think things through, and were primarily letting the "hey, maybe I didn't miss *this* boat!" mentality get in the way of thinking deeply about why a coin like Litecoin should or should not retain long-run value relative to bitcoin.

It's a shame that it's taken this rash of new coins to make people realize that Litecoin ultimately doesn't offer very much to the crypto-ecosystem, but so be it.