People think, copying a few pieces of code will earn them thousands
it already HAS made them money, simply because of increasing adoption rates - btc mining is all about ASICs now, which is why all the GPU/FPGA hardware is now being utilized to do LTC mining, in other words, coming up with a crypto-currency based on BTC is not at all stupid, it's just simple - and early-adopters are going to profit anyhow.
Just do the maths: you could invest $5k US in LTCs or spend the same amount of money on dedicated mining hardware. People able to accumulate 1k-5k of LTCs at this time, are really only waiting for an LTC bubble, i.e. like the 04/2013 BTC bubble, where the value exceeded $200US. It's really just a matter of patience, i.e. time - consider it "compound interest", get in early and accumulate LTCs and exit once you have reached a nice ROI.