I poses both of them and in future cryptoworld you will need both.Right now ETH is so far from ATH,but XRP also.With  some good news both should rise and get there again.Well,thats only my opinion and you should do your research first before investing in crypto.

For MEW, etherscan is all i need,but ty to mention alternative methods .
But as the time goes by and some new interesting ICO´s are coming lot of new wallets are also needed if you want to stay connected.So this info was helpfull for me.

It also depend on market situation.Right now the market is still bearish,you can still wait a bit before you buy some crypto.Now you have some time also to do your research and to learn .
For exemple, at the end of year market strating some kind of relly.Last year it was a bubble,be aware.Try to buy before all times highs,easy to say.But if you want to trade that must be your goal.Learn how to do it.
If you just want to buy and hold for long time you must concentrate what you buy.Find some project with working product to go safe.Anything else is more risky and you can lose your money.But cryptoworld is all risky and you should only invest what you can afford to lose,thats the first rule.

In short, AltcoinsTalks is a better place to run a bounty, so why do some bitcointalk users complain, why don't they just join here and create an account and rank it up as well, which by the way many do.
The answer is that some btt users want to limit others from accessing bounties so that they can get a bigger share themselves [hint: merit system on btt] , thus if a senior or hero member is valued on btt just because he is a senior member, not because of the contributions or activity that is by definition an anti-meritocratic system. 

Furthermore, all those that created fake and multiple accounts and ranked them up, rejoiced when the merit system came into place in btt, and do not want another forum to reduce their share of the bounty.

So truth,veterans over there just found the system how to ban lot of people just for giving newbies a merit.They of course banned both of them ,5000 banned in 10 days.Lot of them for nothing,but veterans knows that Moos has no time to care about it and they do it in purpose.Just to get ther rewards higher.
Nice community there where legends can do what ever they want