"More people familiar with varying the code and variants of the code is good, as it seems like there will regularly be need to update all the many altcoins so the more people capable of doing so maybe the more likely it is to happen.
Two that really need updating badly are Tenebrix and GeistGeld, they might even be old enough that they might crap out on file size of the blockchain on 32 bit Windows systems maybe or something silly like that.
They are interestingly different from each other too since Tenebrix is scrypt without merged mining whereas GeistGeld is SHA256 with merged mining. So bringing both of those up to date would be a really great learning-project for someone and meanwhile of course both are also so ridiculously low difficulty you could be mining them both all along with CPUs and rake in tons of both while you learn. Unlike starting a new coin you don't tend to get jumped on by all the big miners with these old coins, so you can go months on end peacefully mining them with CPUs.
Compare that with the way difficulty skyrockets on new coins lately and you'll see those new coins won't likely be useful for spreading the coins around newbies for maybe months or years, whereas these old coins have been serving newbies well for what, a year or more now and still nice low difficulty...
-MarkM-