I've been in the same boat. I saw things that were interesting but i always stayed away from any "coin" that has a CEO. 

Also it turned out that most other coins try to do too many things or are too similar to bitcoin with just 1 or 2 things they try to do differentely.

And then there's like 100 or so that are just piggybacking on ETH.

Lessons were learned. I'm gonna stay in my lane from now on.