Positioning themselves as a tipping currency was a smart move. The internet has badly needed a way to reward people with very small amounts of money for years. That's one of the things I really like about doge, personally.
It was BTC that found a way "to send really small amounts of money through the internet". No need to invent a niche.
To me it looks like the ones using dogecoin don't want to think of it as money, but just some other form of internet points like karma.
But they didn't, and marketing matters.
I can send 0.0001 BTC Or 10000 Satoshi
BTC is too big. Satoshi is too small, something in between is just ... nice.
Also the mission statement of Bitcoin and Dogecoin are different.
Bitcoin is looking to replace world currency transactions by a secure peer-to-peer distributed network resistant to external attack through utilization of blah blah blah snooze.
Dogecoin is going to the moon.
Right, and Dogecoin is very quickly going to run up against the problems associated with a many-gigabyte blockchain.