Well you should know enough about Asics then to realize the only Scrypt Asic out now is gridseed and it is buggy as well as getting very little hashrate for it's cost. In the current alt market it may never R.O.I.
What gridseed are you looking at? For $150 shipped you can get a device which mines at 350-400kh. With a few minutes of adjustment, it'll do 450 which is on par with a 270. For people who are serious about mining, you get pricing as low as $135 shipped. This is full kit pricing, not just the device. Try finding a GPU which will do 450+ kh for $135 shipped which also includes your PSU, motherboard and other essentials. And the price will be $100 pretty soon. First gen rack mining systems are on the way in May, even more hash for less power and cost per kh than right now.
As to ROI.. nothing in this market is profitable right now, but BTC wasn't for 5 years either. It's all about the long term purpose. For GPUC, if he hadn't switched to N, it would still be "affordable" for people to mine and would've provided a buffer for lack of marketing and management.
And "real" or powerful scrypt asics like Alpha Tech or KG Miner are just pre-order vaporware scams until they are actually manufactured, tested, and out to the public, at which time they also will be very expensive and may never R.O.I. in this coin market, as their will be even more miners selling and less buyers around.
KNC will own the Scrypt market by Q1 2015. Their entry level systems will be 300-500mh running off of a simple PSU. I would trust them over others, but, Gridseed's equivalent unit is already being developed as well. Expect those 2 companies to do some great stuff. I realize ROI is important, but BTC/LTC will bounce back strong once we get through this dip. We haven't hit the floor yet, but when it goes up it's going to be pretty strong.
And they are going to need a hell of a lot of memory on board for future N factor of scrypt-N, so they ain't gonna be cheap!
Yawn. They said the same thing about Scrypt. Considering they've already overcome this for Scrypt AND ScryptN.. it's a moot point. Especially with the ASIC units costing LESS than similar-hashing GPUs.. which you've apparently failed to consider.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not 100% against Asics, they save A LOT of power and electricity bills, but by the time they come out they are soon expensive paperweights.
This was all said by the Scrypt ASIC detractors months ago.. and most of them are switching over.
And by the time they come out, Nvidia will have lower power and higher hashrate Maxwell gaming cards, and AMD will have higher hashrate gaming cards, and guess what? I can sell my 280x's, buy whatever is the fastest and most energy efficient new gaming card, and pop em in my rigs and be as fast as Asics, and use the money from my sold 280x's to pay for most of the new cards. You can't do that with Asics.
Go back and look at the GPU market when BTC went to ASIC. You couldn't sell the cards for anywhere near market price, but you could with ASIC. While I understand the point you're trying to make, and I do agree that you can usually resell GPUs provided they have a market, it doesn't matter if you can't resell an ASIC because it'll ROI far faster than a GPU, and since it uses next to no electricity (1-5w @ 12vdc @ 350-500kh) compared to a similar GPU, it wouldn't make sense to resell them. But, if you did.. you'd find people would be willing to pay a lot to get their hands on them.
To say you can't do that with ASICS is to go against ASIC history in the cryptocurrency movement. It's as if you're ignoring it.
So in summary.. they cost equal to less.. they use exponentially less power.. and provide equal to greater hashrate.. and you're going to say they're the worse choice?
Open up a spreadsheet program and take 5 minutes to run ROI calculations. ASIC will ROI in about half the time on average, and in this market that means a lot.