When you're comparing coins, it's better to use their market capitalizations instead of prices, since their total amount of coins vary.
For example, one 42Coin(total of 42 coins) is worth about $27000 and it's not very popular, while one Dogecoin(total of 100 billion coins) is worth about $0.00087 and its popularity is booming. Hoping for DOGE to reach $1 is quite surreal.
I'd rather ask “Which altcoins will break $100,000,000 market cap in 2014?”.
Very well said, I strongly recommend you consider checking out Einsteinium coin (EMC2) for all the very same reasons you mentioned, it is new and has a philanthropic objective to give a percentage of the blocks mined to science related programs and charities, plus roughly only 299 000 000 coins can be mined. I believe in it and think it will do very well very soon