What I see is the market is now getting saturated. Back in 2013 you could get off with a rebranded LTC/DOGE clone (from coingen or similar service, although it is not very hard to create the clone manually) with little or no innovation and with a bit of luck and not much effort get it to an exchange and make some money.
Good promotion/branding was helping more than technical quality here.
Some coins have brought minor improvements (better difficulty retargeting, coin rewarding or PoW algorithm, marginal improvements to the wallet UI), major improvements or ideas were relatively rare (PoS, anonymous coin transfer, ...)
I am not sure how profitable would it be to release a new "copycat" coin today, I think some people will still hop in to mine some (what if this coin takes off? Risky, but possible profit may be large), but chance to make some reasonable profit here for the dev are IMHO quite small. ICOs are better from perspective of coin creator, as you collect some money first and then release the coin later, bur people are now aware that the ICO market is full of scams and are very cautious to invest into someone with no or bad reputation.
For innovative coin (if you are smart enough to invent a completely new feature/concept, then go for it, but I'd consider a coin that mixes features from several other coins as innovative - for example smart contracts from Ethereum with anonymous sending, master nodes and on-chain voting/funding from DASH, add in PoS, multiple PoW algos, proof-of-space/capacity from other coins ....) you could do a good start, but that is nothing you can create within a day, it will be more like months of work of small to medium team to get first version ready and then work on improvements and bugfixes once the coin is alive. Good testing is a must, as small technical error can kill the coin quite quickly and community is not very forgiving if you would do several successive hardforks to fix your glitches.
From purely technical point of view: Bitcoin is technically inferior to other coins, but it was first and has long tradition and wide acceptance.
My personal prediction is that there will be many active viable coins in the future (like we have many active FIAT currencies nowadays), but from smaller coins (lets say lower than 50th place on coinmarket cap) I think more than 90% of them will die off or stagnate (it could be profitable if you predict correctly the few of them that will survive and invest into them