My pet theory is that it is miners who are providing the liquidity despite most of them being long term bullish, not just to pay expenses but also in an attempt to keep the price artificially low to protect their market share by keeping mining less profitable for new entrants due to upfront costs. But with each dump attempt, the liquidity gets soaked up and held. I believe that this market share protectionism is also primary in the blocking of SegWit as well.
I liked your theory.
The boom is coming though, first from smart money and then mainstream money short behind. The next three months will see the launch of the major projects that will make owning at least a small amount of BTC a must for many. These are t0, MegaUpload2/BitCache and Yours.
The megaupload 2.0 was mostly hype and talk at first but i think with someone so experienced in this field like KimDotkom it can be a good publicity for bitcoin and bring lots of new people to bitcoin which will bring lots of money in.
People need a real reason to use bitcoin over fiat, and so far I haven't seen really compelling reasons.
the reasons are all there for those who look for it, but the use cases aren't for example bitcoin is the best for paying for everything online but you can't find places that are popular (eg Amazon, Ebay) to use bitcoin.