ethash held out surprisingly well. certainly a lot of asics were sold, but it didn't fully knock out GPUs like say sha256 did with btc. where as grin... you changed your original tone on it and decided to embrace asics with specific changes to CC to support that.
The original Cuckoo Cycle turned out to be rather ASIC friendly; the Cuckatoo variant even more so. But it's the Cuckaroo variants that saw the most changes to make them substantially more ASIC resistant.
update: removed comment about ROI cause I didn't do the full maths.
That comment makes no sense, since most cryptocurrencies have no use except speculation. The price is low (well, no lower than Doge) because Grin deters speculation, and hence much fewer people are willing to speculate on it.
> ROI is 4300+ days
Based on what electricity price?