With one scam after another coming up in the crypto world, at this point we have a better chance of hitting $100 than $1000, much less $10k.
We are somehow getting more immune to the scam news and now it takes quite a lot of stolen coins to have any direct impact on the price of Bitcoin. Sadly, this still happens and, if frequent, it may in the end have bigger impact, as you say. All we need, is more fundamental developments that will strengthen the adoption to convince more people to use Bitcoin. Once the trend reverses and the are more positive news, we may see the rise again. Of course, there is also a possibility of another purely speculative bubble, but that would be very negative for Bitcoin in the long run.
I always have to spell this out to people... *we* are meaningless. We're involved in BTC. We know how things work. We're a community. In regards to BTC's growth, we're irrelevant at this point. We need OTHERS. The people that DON'T know how things work and all they hear about is "scam scam ponzi scam ponzi ponzi scam." These are the responses I've gotten from at least 100 different people I've tried to introduce BTC to. Usually it ends up with them showing a news article about another big scam and then writing off anything I say from that point on because "it's obviously a scam and you're going to lose everything you put into it."
People need to get out of this mindset that what WE think matters. It doesn't. We have to GROW. That means bringing OTHERS on. And as long as some douchebags keep doing everything in their power to ensure nobody else trusts the system enough to look into it, this simply isn't going to happen.