Nobody missed your silly point. You still need to mine a minimum amount of eth before you can cash out, you can join pools that pay sooner. There is no next best thing to constantly chase if you dont want to.
And you just confirmed my point.
There is good old reliable fallback options such as zec and skien. These have been consistently paying 30-50% more than ETH.
For nvidia cards certainly. I think many people just like ETH, and with the shortage of AMD cards recently, are content to buy nvidia cards to mine it. There are people out there who want to mine BTC as well, and while we can agree that it's a tough adventure, they have their reasons.
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Point is you don't have to do much chasing to mine the most valuable coin and the reasons people mine ETH and hold it hoping it will go up is because they are lazy, uninformed or have no idea what they are doing.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of people out there with those qualities you mentioned. But to call them silly, is trying to fit your priorities onto them. Sometimes I'll turn on my profit-miners in awesome miner to mining pool hub just to accumulate a wide variety of coins (I don't auto-convert to BTC). If it was "profitable" for the brief period at one time, I reckon they will come back around again later. I tend to look at the longer average of a coin rather than to ride the waves. I mined sigt for a while, denarius before that, chaincoin before that, lbry before that (and occasionally come back to it), Zencash before that, Skein before that... I'm currently mining diamond. It's consistently a top performer... but I came to realize, I'm chasing these coins for the wrong reasons.
I have a bunch of friends like that, they are all of those things above plus as you say have limited time. But once I showed them the way they are kicking themselves for all those missed profits.
Are you autoconverting to BTC at a pool? Which one?