no marketing guy here, but I made pretty much the same thought process as you. with all the coins out there, something like a doge-coin is very successful right now, what does it mean? well to analyze a bit around: from my observation there is something like hype in pop culture which leads to certain "products" to become very successful for a limited period of time. If you ask me, dogecoin seems to be just that within the crypto world, and I agree, it wont survive long term, as teenies and girlies and reddit victims probably simply just loose interest in it, or maybe the start digging a kittencoin instead, anyways, that's all pretty silly nonserious stuff.
now lets get to litecoin: the name is actually well chosen, first of all that coin connects to bitcoin and solves most of it's flaws, and it carries it's function and purpose in it's name: it is the light version of bitcoin if you want.
but if we come to the whole pool of alts, and I have to agree with you again, the tech behind it is not that important for the masses, except for a few environmentalists who like coins that don't need much power to be mined and some other minority groups people will go with something catchy. I really wonder why it took so long to find the best name for a crypto coin, it should have been obvious even to the creators and namegivers of bitcoin itself... smart coin!
what are the implications of this name?
actually there are around three distinctive ones that I could find, some work at a very low/basic long range society development level, I will further explain:
1. the coining (no pun intended) of the word "smart" itself already happened with the widespread adoption of smart-phones! If that would not have happened already, smart could and would be taken by many with the connotation of "smart-ass" and "nerdy" stuff. This will not happen, smart is good.
2. there is a worldwide sociological movement from religion to science, from dark to light, and from stupid to smart going on. smartcoin with it's brilliant name just put's itself into just that boat and sails towards the worlds common denominator of global enlightenment, which is long due for this planet if you ask me. at the same time it may also put a stand on old money and old money systems, attacking it lightly and smartly: i.e. stupid money, banker's money and all the other stuff that just works like a method of taxation and thus costs money and is slow, but just maybe for that.
3. smart phones, and especially apple with their "i". there is no more direct and obvious link to that. If you ask a child what money makes most sense to be used with a
smartphone it will probably answer something including that very word also, so it might aswell answer
smartmoney/dollar/coins. and THAT is potential beyond belief. Also we know apple puts the letter "i" in front of all their smart devices, they call them "i" devices, which intuitively gets accepted as either intelligent devices or internet devices, more the further than the ladder! what does this mean? If apple won't create iMoney one day, we will probably be using smart money on our iphones one day, because every kid gets it that you need to use smart money on a smart pone, what is the thousands of years old symbol for money? it's the coin, thus it is so obvious that we intuitively are going to use smart coins to pay with our smart and i-devices.
these are the 3 cornerstones of smartcoin in my humble opinion. given that the devs and the comminity don't let the coin leave abondoned or in any other way malnourished, it will just grow fine and at some point create a hype which will settle down to steady growth and mass adoption instead of decay. this is no doge or kittencoin, not even an outer space quark coin, or ridiculous moon coin, this is something to be taken seriously and will take its rightful place amongst the tops if not THE top of cryptos just by basic logic and human intuition.
no coin can compete with this. I just wonder if the name can actually be "stolen" in any way, cause the marketing value of it is immense.
anyways, I am not heavily invested in this coin, although to some high percentage I am, which is still low by absolute means I guess - if you liked this explanation and want more analysis like this, maybe even on youtube, feel free to express your encouragement by that: SjZhcQbXW4kyPqDVNwig7gXDrJUVxMLDgv
thanks!
bye!
p.s. gonna hold this coin at least 12 months, even though it still sinks a bit, but whatever

- tell me what you think!
a few points, just because there is a worldwide adoption of smartphones doesn't mean you can slap the word smart on anything and it'll succeed. There's really not that much in a name as you think, a lot of the world's biggest/most successful company have fairly ordinary names especially within the techsphere (microsoft, google, apple etc... ) do any of these sound particularly "smart" to you? the reason they succeed is because of their core product (google with their search engine, apple with their ipods/macs then later on iphones, microsoft with windows) to succeed you need a core product that can sell well which will then reflect in the success of the particular product, in this case, the prices of alt coins.
yes there may be pump and dumps and so forth, you guys can keep coming up with "smart" reasons to believe in this coin, I'll only remained convinced when the price starts moving the other way, upwards. I watch this coin drop from 30 cents to about 2 cents right now in two weeks, so once again, the price speaks for it self. Not so smart after all.