I edited my post
It is the sheer number of altcoins and often have very similar function to others. BCN would have been good without the premine due to the cryptonote, I think monero has potential but it is not user friendly yet. With many others there are just so many I cant keep up with them. The population wouldn't want many different coins I don't think harder to manage, so a few with unique potentials seems better than many that are just forks with a name change, and some changing of the block reward and a couple of other things. But also the names. Bitcoin is a great name I think 'hey mate that will be 3 bitcoins!' Sounds good. In many altcoins they have even forgotten to replace 'bitcoin' in some of the software. There was one altcoin which I cannot remember now that I downloaded and it said 'bitcoin core is shutting down' on exit. Or in titcoin for example you go to the debug window and it goes 'Bitcoin - Debug window'.
'hey mate that will be 2 feathercoins' or 'hey mate six ziftrcoins' although ziftrcoin was intended to be a coupon type thing.
many of the names don't go into general conversation flow. Bitcoin, litecoin does. Unobtanium does not but due to the nature of it that is okay to me, hey mate, one UNO please sounds good. Or 'mate I have some unobtanium if you are willing to trade'. Monero or bytecoin isn't too bad in this respect. Obviously this is subjective, I am thinking of a time when you walk into a shop with a mobile wallet or pay the bus driver with a mobile wallet. UNO I don't think is intended for widespread use, but for its rarity. Hold your phone over the terminal which carries the receiving wallets public key and presto paid. So the coins need to not only just launch with little change of something that is already good, but needs uniqueness, support and definitely mobile support, if any altcoin offered that out of the box complete with a system to accept payments before launch it has a better chance of gaining a foothold. Litecoin got mobile wallets later, bitcoin has them also.
