bittorrent and many other zombie coins have been on the market for a long time, but now they can only buy a couple of chewing gums.
Still, Litecoin has been in the top 30 for so long time for other reasons: this is the POW algorithm, an understandable scheme for working with it, resistance to attack 51, due to the high hash rate, low fees, ease of use.
When bitcoin grows, everything grows after it and vice versa. In fact, there is no market without Bitcoin yet.
That’s the thing about litecoin, not only it has been around for a long time (since 2011 which means it has been around for 11 years, going into 12 soon) they are also in the top 30 all this time, never went lower. If it was a bad one, then just like the ones you named it would have gone lower, but there were dozens of projects that were higher than litecoin in history, and then dropped under litecoin as well.
Because they were bad projects that got hyped for a while, and then they turned out bad and dropped under litecoin. Meanwhile, litecoin may have failed to go to top since those days, but it also never went lower like that neither which gives a good reason to keep some of it on your portfolio.
I agree with you about Litecoin. Few altcoins can be found on the market with similar characteristics.
Nevertheless, many people do not consider Litecoin to be something promising, constantly trying to find a 'hidden gem' somewhere else, skipping seemingly obvious things.
However, while the price will remain at the same level as now, the mass popularity of litecoin will not be seen, and this is also important.
Litecoin is really similar to "digital silver", but it is still very undervalued.