It is in the spirit of competition to a larger, already-established player. This is free market; yes, the LCC team is obviously using LTC's good name and forking without LTC's permission to make a new coin. This is possible with blockchain technology. Forking this way encourages the original to improve themselves or get bypassed by a new player without all the advertisement FUD and lawsuits.
Wouldn't you love to see Microsoft forked like this on their software packages? Or for an independent game programmer to fork a well-established game with modifications to make the game better, or have a different theme that the original game producers simply refuse to implement for their own reasons?
very well analysed @jhpace1 ! You changed my perspective for good , Thnx!