All the rage right now is the anon feature. All coins with this feature seem to rocket at the moment. We need something original or at least a feature that people want and is sought after in today's market. We need to stand out as not being like most other coins. Any thoughts?
I think the first question you need to ask is what are you trying to accomplish? If you're looking for a short term pop in the price, then you could probably add a feature or two like anonymity, and you might get that. If you're trying to create a coin that has value and will stand the test of time, then you need to create something that either competes with or complements bitcoin.
Obviously, there are many technical ways to improve upon bitcoin. Although I don't care much about it myself, anonymity has been popular lately, as you said.
I think very fast transactions are important. I think it would be very beneficial if we could figure out a way to get a confirmation within a few seconds like with credit cards. The tricky thing here is that block times of less than 30 seconds don't work very well.
I think ASIC resistance is important. Otherwise you end up with centralization and exclude the little guys from mining (note that I'm biased here as I'm one of the little guys), which is one of the things that draws some people, like myself, into cryptocurrencies--it's a lot of fun.
I think it's important to have some kind of mechanism that ensures your coins go where you intend. I'm always concerned that I'll send my coins into oblivion. Maybe some kind of pre-confirmation system could be implemented as an option for transactions. You set up a transaction in your wallet which contacts the destination wallet, letting it know you're about to send coins. The owner of the destination wallet could let you know that you're successfully connecting with it, at which point you could safely send your coins. For example, if you're sending to an exchange, when you set up the transaction, the exchange could let you know you have the right address via their website.
I like the idea of improving Spartan Coin, but, unfortunately, I'm guessing that these things would take a lot of time and effort to add.