Are we feeling the pain yet? 
This is what I think; its total speculation. Miners have been holding a significant portion of their supply hoping for an upwards bounce. But those coins eventually needed to be sold to make ends meet. Essentially you can think of it like these miners were leveraged long (borrowing $ from their own bills that must be paid). As the price slowly dropped, we approached the line where certain miners had to sell to make sure they could keep the electricity on. This became a cascading effect, driving a rapid price descent.
I'm waiting for the hash rate graph to flinch. This will indicate that some miners are shutting off units, which will tell me that we are approaching the marginal cost to produce a coin. Shutting off miners will reduce supply, and likely indicate a bottom since utility (as measured by metrics like transactions to new addresses) is still increasing.
This is what I think; its total speculation. Miners have been holding a significant portion of their supply hoping for an upwards bounce. But those coins eventually needed to be sold to make ends meet. Essentially you can think of it like these miners were leveraged long (borrowing $ from their own bills that must be paid). As the price slowly dropped, we approached the line where certain miners had to sell to make sure they could keep the electricity on. This became a cascading effect, driving a rapid price descent.
I'm waiting for the hash rate graph to flinch. This will indicate that some miners are shutting off units, which will tell me that we are approaching the marginal cost to produce a coin. Shutting off miners will reduce supply, and likely indicate a bottom since utility (as measured by metrics like transactions to new addresses) is still increasing.
But to elaborate: If the projected difficulty goes down after an adjustment, it doesn't mean anything for the actual difficulty that is in place. It's just a projection. So yeah, the difficulty hasn't gone down a single time since at least April 30 2013: 
