You can mine anything you want with whatever. You had enough going to fund whatever you would like to do. Not sure where you went wrong.
Many dont stick with a coin and just switch around wasting time and money. Gpus can mine nearly anything simultaneously.
Each hardware has their own atributes. It took me a bit of tweaking, but i got cpu asic and gpu running in one instance of bfgminer. Less then 0.01% rejections vs 20-50% with asic or gpu on their own.
Hardware being unprofitable or useless is not known to me. Its usually human error or behavior. Not the hardware.
Oh man....now come on. When exchanges like Gox get hacked and the price of BTC slides for over a year and is at $176 in Jan 2015 and the power cost is over $0.10 / kWh I can't imagine human error being the issue for being profitable during that period.