I have a strong opinion about "DEV" driven coins.. In my opinion they never work. All that happens is the community is fed bullshit promises that are only used to pump the price short term for the gain of a few, while the majority get exploited. I will of course be a leader in our community and look for opportunities to grow our project, however, I strongly feel the majority of GROUPCoin's development comes from the community!
I feel a GROUPCoin foundation comprised of participants like yourself will be key to GROUPCoin's success moving forward. We have one key value proposition, and that is our distribution. Lets capitalize on that! Anything is possible,as long as we have a solid foundation. One that we pour today!
Personally I don't have a problem with dev driven coins, assuming the dev remains active and adds unique features to a coin. Of course that isn't always the case here, where many claims are simply promises or whitepapers of some far off plans that never see the light of day. In those cases, yeah, such promises do more harm than good.
But some features, lets say a mobile wallet and such is never a bad idea.
And if a coin isn't going with unique code (anon, nxt flavor, decentralized marketplace, crypti/ethereum/maidsafe, qora, etc) then it may be best to focus on marketplaces/commerce or a specialized niche. The distribution is a plus, but I guess I just look at it like every coin ideally should have a purpose (outside of trading on an exchange). It's just a matter of figuring out what niche the coin fits into.