Hello and welcome!
I am not the best in explaining things but I will try my best to address a couple of your questions.
All cryptocurrencies including bitcoin are far from mass adoption. I think that we are still in very early stages. A lot of VC investments happened the last year and soon (within the next couple of years) I expect cryptocurrencies to be much easier and friendly used and there will be a stage that will reach mass adoption. Most people believe that the cryptocurrency to rule them all will be bitcoin. Myself and many others in here believe it will be bitshares (and I will explain the potential) or something else not yet discovered..
Now bitshares is so many things and will become much more things. It is a bank, a forex platform with market pegged assets bitusd,bitgold,bitcny, bitbtc, bitoil etc and also UIA (user issue assets, anyone can issue whatever asset he might think of, convince people of its value and sell it).
There are some very big differences with bitcoin and other altcoins out there. Bitcoin are produced by mining and miners verify transactions (proof o fwork POW) other coins are based on proof of stake (POS) where there is no mining involved. Many coins out there are scam coins. Other coins may have good intentions but are getting hammered by the bitcoin elite etc etc...There are a lot to learn out there... Bitshares uses DPOS (delegate proof of stake) which is by far more advanced by POS and by faaaaarrrrr more advanced than POW (bitcoin). Bitcoin is dropping in price right now because mining is just not profitable anymore. There are a lot of flaws and problems with POW coins. POW just doesn't make any sense to me. The economics of POW and simple POS coins will not be able to compete with the economics of DPOS systems.
Now all these cryptocurrencies, although very useful since people can transfer instantly value between them across the internet etc etc have a very big problem. Due to lack of mass adoption and small liquidity they are extremely volatile. BTS has solved this problem by trading bitassets and other market pegged assets. BTS allows people now to trade bitusd that will always track the value of usd with small differences from time to time.
The economics behind BTS are very strong and the peg will hold. In short, bitusd can only come into existance by short selling the bitusd by adding x2 its value in BTS collateral. Anyone that believes that BTS will increase in value vs. bitusd will want to short sell the bitusd and profit from the increased value of his BTS. Anyone who believes that BTS price will fall compared to bitusd wants security and will buy bitusd. When someone short sells the bitusd, essentially borrows bitusd from the system and sells them, someone else is accepting this bet and the bitusd is created. For the first time since 2009 people can invest in stable cryptocurrencies. The bitusd, bitcny,bitgold etc..
Now. By holding bitassets (bitusd, biteur,bitgold etc) you can earn interest on your deposit (yield). So if you want to invest in bitcoin, you could get some bitbtc and earn some interest in bitbtc as well Holding BTS will not get you any interest. It all comes to the end of what type of investor you are. If you really believe in BTS and want to profit from a potential huge upside in BTS price you want to keep BTS no matter what happens and no matter how much the price might fall because when / if the price rises the upside potential can be huge. If bitusd is massively adopted and accepted by merchants as a stable cryptocurrency payment, if forex traders inject money in the BTS ecosystem etc etc you can imagine that if for example the market cap of bitusd is millions or billions then BTS market cap should be in billions or trillions. Currently forex trading is worthing trillions $$ and BTS market cap is c.$30 million where bitcoin's market cap is c$3 billion. There is huge potential for BTS once people realize its potential. BTS is also a secured DECENTRALIZED bank. One can save his usd or eur in BTS earn some interest and never be afraid of a bank seizing his deposits (Cyprus and soon Greece and others to follow..). To me the biggest profit with bitshares is not because the supply is reduced by burning bitshares. The biggest value is the decentralised bank and forex platform that it provides, the DNS (Domain system) and Voting system that will provide and many other things that will happen in the future like Insurances, Loans etc etc..
Finally in terms of your other questions. Bitcoin can be denominated in 8 decimal points so the smaller unit of 1 bitcoin is 0.00000001. Ripple is very nice but the one big problem that ripple has is that it is very centralised (few people own more than 80% of XRPS) so holding XRPs for profit can be extremely volatile and dangerous investment.
The process to obtain easily bitshares is:
1. Get verified in an exchange. The best ones trading Bitshares are bter and btc38. Buy some bitcoins and exchange them for BTS (bitshares)
2. Send your BTS to your BTS wallet and either save them for the future or start trading buy buying bitassets.
If you can not get verified and transfer fiat currencies to the above exchanges you could do so via bitstamp, btc-e, kraken, bitfinex, coinbase. Again depending where you live.
If you haven't done already download the latest BTS wallet from:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=7067.0The faucet to get you some BTS and register is
http://faucet.bitshares.org/?r=mf-tzoBytemaster who is the mastermind of BTS has a very nice blog explaining a lot of things. You definitely want to have a look there:
http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/?r=mf-tzoOther interesting sites you may want to check is:
http://bitshares.tv/bitshares-101a?r=mf-tzohttp://bitshares.tv/bitusd-mobile-wallet?r=mf-tzoNow no matter how many explanations give you, eventually you will need to try it yourself to understand how Bitcoin, Bitshares etc all work.
I hope I have answered some of your questions and helped. Anything else give us a shout.