I believe it's a fad.
The most important part of a currency is its community how it is actually used for commerce, and not some fancy feature.
Plus, there's the Dark Wallet in developpement for Bitcoin. When this will be released, it would make way more sense to use this and then use your Bitcoins in one of the hundreds of shops who accept it rather than convert them to a new an unstable currency like Darkcoin which has virtually no merchant acceptance.
I agree, owning a business myself my concerns are
who is the developer and community behind the coin
how secure is the network
does it work and is it proven
does it provide opportunities for other types of capital investment e.g. shares
as I understand all this is provided by bitcoin and can be done on the bitcoin blockchain and are already in development
any other fancy features can be applied to bitcoin and the blockchain and are only for a marginal market not the mainstream
an example of another type of coin that would work is a decentralised google coin with a feature that would assist business with marketing opportunities and again it would have to be decentralised. This would have a great ongoing development team behind it who you know.
as for the community seeing other coins being attacked by other coin community's gives an impression of fraudulent activity even if what they are doing is exposing another coins fraudulent activity
an example is the current attacks against litecoin (it is a good coin, regardless of what they say it works and the network is secure)
this in itself is not a defining reason to dismiss a coin and its developers but it does bring into question the validity of the coin being a pump and dump (easy for a dev to make another account and attack another coins devs and community)
a recent example and tell me if I am wrong, darkota's attack on the other coins community and his support for Monero
I feel sorry for Monero as it does look good but am reluctant to support the coin as of yet due to the actions of this member and his support for the coin
it is good to expose fraudulent activity with proof but to harass, call people names and personally attack the dev and its community is wrong
yes i know the bitcoin community and litecoin community have done this as well but they are now proven coins and networks
once a coin gets above this type of behaviour and is proven it negates the reason for dismissing a coin