Your reasoning for Ether is not too sound "can never be bad", checking into their scaling along with having a million blockchains tied to one and see if there is a future in that. I am not saying there isn't money to be made, but I am sure it will be based on offshoot ETH blockchains but not ETH itself.
LBC and Gridcoin ftw!
I will look into MonaCoin just based on you mentioning LBC and Grid (I've definitely heard the name)
Yes, I didn't have a really strong argument for Ether, I just appreciate the concept and love that it grew so big. On the other hand, however, I can see that it can potentially fail beyond a size.
But what I have argument for is Augur! That is another amazing concept, built on Ethereum, and I'm happy that it also grew so big.