I'm sure we could debate this for hours. In work in the finance industry and there are certainly day traders that can take advantage of market inefficiencies for a time and indeed make quite a bit of money. Eventually they always do run out of steam as the market changes or others catch in to their schemes.
Regardless, bitcoin is far too small of a market with far too low liquidity to successfully day trade. Additionally, I doubt that many people here have the knowledge and experience to make money at it if they did. 90% of the predictions on these forums are based on someone's hunch or some really basic TA without anything else to back it up. People like to see patterns where there isn't. It's the way out brains work. People love to fit the 2011 bubble crashes graph over 2013s as if that is supposed to mean something. 99% of what you read here is bullshit. The only thing that seems to be consistent is this: when the market is up, the bulls come out, when the market is down, the bears come. Note that the bitcoin price is the driving force here. It would be great if it were the other way around because then we'd all be rich!
I'm sure we could too. I work on the exchange floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and I will gladly introduce you to more traders than you will ever bother to remember that have traded almost their entire lives quite successfully. Traders that fail to change with the market, fail in the end. And the way our brains work is exactly like you said. When the market goes up the bulls come out and when the market goes down the bears come. The smart, successful trader is the one who removes himself from either of those two groups and proceeds to take advantage of both of them.
The only things I would somewhat agree with in your post are the problems of liquidity, and stupidity.
Like you said, people are pretty predictable based on what the market is doing. If you can't see the insanely simple logic to using that in trading then you're smart to stay out of the game. Being a successful trader is often times so ridiculously easy and stupid that people refuse to believe it.
I also worked in Wealth management and will soon be receiving my degree in finance. The worlds of finance and of trading are insanely different worlds and I didn't realize that until I started working on the floor and meeting traders. I know now that every perception I had of trading before I surrounded myself by it was completely wrong, and is also shared by just about everybody in the finance world that ISN'T in trading.