Hobonickles HBN should be on the whitelist. Small but supportive community, Dev is awesome. He's working on alot of good stuff, for example his RasberryPi client software.
I dont know what code is just copied and what he brought in himself but he knows what features are nice and gets them working before being implemented on any other coins I know of. If you have questions he's there to answer them.
You might want to take a look at: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=303749.0
This is not a 0 post dev who made another pump and dump coin and moves onto the next when he sucked some btc from some people. The community doesnt whine about prices which is also realy refreshing when you read through the posts.
I hope someone with more insight into the technical stuff will post here aswell as for me this is the most overlooked coin out there.
Also DRK might be a canditate. And Myriad coin. As I dont know if they were the inventors of their unique features and properties I leave it to someone else to explain or get them on the whitelist.
And I would like to add that you shouldnt measure the usefullness of a coin just on a small technical innovation but also by its community and developers. At least for me those 2 are the most important part.
I'm a miner. When I mine a coin I dont think about getting rich quick so I dont mine purely on profit, althou I made some good deals along the way.