>we could just iterate on existing ones, and have our userbase intact without having to 'gain traction' for an entirely new alt-coin.
I think there are some fundamental limits to the throughput of a single cryptocurrency due to network latency and bandwidth. Perhaps the solution to scalability is simply to have multiple cryptocurrencies and to facilitate atomic swaps between them. So in this sense, the creation of new cryptocurrencies with minor feature changes (litecoin, bitcoin cash, wownero, cheapeth, etc.) is actually good for network diversity.
That being said, the owners of existing "big" cryptocurrencies will usually want to make changes that increase its usability to compete with these "trivial forks"
Bitcoiners have been soured by the idea of a hard fork since the XT dispute, while the monero userbase has commited itself to regular hard forks every 6 months to upgrade the network.