There isn't enough fiat to support the endless flow of new coins, none of which really give you anything new as a consumer. Most just appeal to miners, and that isn't going to be enough to make them successful. If you look at coinmarketcap.com it's pretty clear how rapidly the capital distribution thins out after the top five coins. Actually, the fall-off from coin to coin the top five is really dramatic, and then it slows as the capital spreads out amongst the rest...but all of them added up don't even equal Litecoin's cumulative market value.
Realistically, large hashrate ASICs will squash the weaker/smaller alts, unless they fork into different algorithms or become merge-mined. Large-scale ASIC miners targeting weak coins will 51% them easily, forking their blockchains...or they'll dump so much of their mined coin on the market that there won't be enough liquidity to absorb it, crashing the value to 1 satoshi or forcing them to trade in a Litecoin pair, because 1 satoshi isn't low enough.
The landscape is about to change radically in the second half of 2014.
As the old saying goes, "buy when there's blood in the streets, even if it's your own".
