If IOTA could be traded normally, the growth would likely surpass most or even all alt-coins right now and in the future. Big players are trying and succeeding in pushing IOTA price down, and tank it up while it's cheap and manipulateable. It makes the most sense to focus on IOTA because:
IOTA is only available on Bitfinex and Binance, one of which is not even accessible from the US. Coinspot too, but it's too small and too Australian to count. Binance and Bitfinex have been DDOS:ed heavily in the last days (many other exchanges too), and the most drastic IOTA price changes up/down happen when the sites (Bitfinex especially) are most inaccessible. A easy way to buy IOTA cheaply at 4.0 - 4.4 USD when their DDOS:sing has eliminated most competition, and there are mainly old buy/sell orders left.
The timing naturally affects all coins, but following IOTA trades in the last days, the manipulators seem to be wasting insane amounts of resources to not make IOTA shoot to its real value before before they've bought enough (currently closer to 8-10 USD).
I'm not an expert, but looking at Bitfinex IOTA trading, it looks like there are lots of spoofed sell orders, same stuff that has been in use for years to manipulate Bitcoin. It seems the buying and selling bots can be deceived easily enough, especially when there are only 2 real exchanges.
IOTA is a a very promising alternative, based on an entirely new technology and an emerging ecosystem. If Bitcoin crashes or Blockchain in general becomes obsolete, IOTA is the best candidate to take the throne, so it's a good idea to focus on hoarding it, especially when most are only seeing the cryptos which are seemingly going up faster. The others are much more available globally and thus can't be manipulated as easily. Not saying that they aren't manipulated too.
The situation will probably change alot when IOTA is tradeable on all big exchanges, which should happen very soon. After that it's more challenging to still simultaneously DDOS all IOTA exchanges, do heavy trade-spoofing and wage a global FUD-campaign to supress interest in it.
I'm not going to eat my dick if IOTA doesn't shoot to the moon right away (I'm not flexible enough), but I'll wager it happens soon, and will definitely HODL and buy a ton when Bitfinex finishes my damn money transfers.
EDIT: Fixed typos and improved wording. A comment about Binance : it's true that IOTA withdrawal was suspended last I checked, as were a some other heavily traded cryptos. In my case I simply switched from Binance to Bitfinex because of this, though it's not exactly 100% stable either.
EDIT: It's true that the tech of it is still alpha/beta, and UX is not yet what it should be. But since I'm a coder myself I've also checked some of their impressive open sourced projects on github and the many participants, and I've become only more convinced that IOTA is the train I want to be onboard on.