What's more important GPU cores or GPU memory? I have been on the sidelines, watching on and off, looking to attempt mining a few coins. I have also looked at just buying coins, but found that's not so easy to do with anonnimity with all the verifications, ID requests and concern of identity theft from scams. Plus FIAT to Bitcoin can run as high as 20% in transaction fees at a bitcoin ATM....sheesh!

So... I'm looking at mining and attempting to decipher the current GPU hardware requirements by COIN TYPE in terms of hash rate, on card memory and other items like CPU cache and main system memory and even M.2 onboard storage/cache on the newer motherboards and if these have any effect at all on a GPU miner setup. 

TOTALLY BRAIN FRIED TRYING TO SORT APPLES, ORANGES and LEMONS OF MIXED DATA.

How do you determine how much GPU core or MEMORY is the minimum needed to mine a specific coin. I'm sure there might be some instances where a lower hash rate card at a lower watt rating might do fine mining, just not as fast as the best of the breed. gpuboss,com has been great for card info, but not all the cards are listed, and some do not give details on power consumption, which when compared at today's crazy prices doesn't give the cost/profit/overhead details.

At this stage it's clear that only a few will continue to mine BITCOIN and ETHERIUM directly given the custom miner farms. Call me a bottom feeder or whatever, but I'm looking at using maybe some less popular cards, lower power cards and less frequented coins to mine and get into the game and migrate into more stable crypto coins to HOLD long term.

Suggestions on plotting the details or sites to follow?

Also some pooled mining does not appear to use all the GPU hash benchmarked from some cards, or at least it doesn't pay the total hash credits offered at that rate.
I would not bother buying new hardware to mine low rate. I suggest you try mining with your existing hw. You could try cpu-mining MAGI, it's easy to start with: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=735170.0

You won't strike it rich but its a nice mining start.

If you want bitcoins to use anonymous I suggest you find someone local to buy from with cash, or buy a prefilled creditcard and use that to buy coins. 

Mining pools don't pay for your hw specs, they pay for the amount of work contributed.