It's a pity that Dogecoin uses such an out of date codebase - having it more up-to-date would give a nice target with real economic value and importantly transaction volume for testing out exploits. (for crypto-coins "exploits" can mean economic design issues which can't necessarily be fixed with code changes) The very short block interval makes attacks like selfish mining easier to try out for instance. Similarly because they kept the 1MB blocksize limit, but with a 10x shorter 1m interval, it gives insight into what Bitcoin would look like if the blocksize limit was raised.

Keep in mind that most people in the crypto-coin dev/theory community don't actually own that many coins, and in any case are insiders that can easily move their coins to whatever crypto-currency is most likely to grow. The smart people aren't wedded to any particular currency, but rather the growth of crypto-currencies in general. Understanding how they fail is essential to making crypto-currencies succeed in the long run.