totally agree! besides a few classics (ETH, LTC, XMR, ecc.) i've spotted most of my coins during major pump events and thrown a few bucks into them without having a real clue of what the projects are actually about... i find due diligence important only when deciding whether investing more heavily for the long term.
i know that most people find the approach questionable, but this way i for ex. entered Antshares when they were <0.90 USD and that turned out quite fine for me
as to Ark, i've held and monitored it for months and i think it'll be one of the coins to go big in 2018. i expect that late Sept to early Nov will be the best moment to try to enlarge my stock.
If this were stocks, I'd agree with you. But since it's coins, and the value of a each is determined almost entirely by bots, hype and whales... I think due diligence might actually be detrimental, as weird as that sounds. I tend to make a lot of my decisions based on the chart, the volume, and the density of hype I detect on the internet. What the coin actually does or what the devs are up to is somewhere between secondary and irrelevant.
