Contrary to your contrary there is no correlation between price and difficulty, there is a correlation between difficulty and price ( in this case order matters ).
You are confused. The word you are looking for is "causation". You want to say that correlation does not imply causation. In other words, the fact that A and B are correlated does not imply that A causes B or that B causes A.
Price and difficulty
are highly correlated. Just look at the graphs. It is pretty obvious. Keep in mind that totally unrelated things can be correlated
(that's called a coincidence).Anyway, it is easy to make the case that price influences difficulty: If the price goes up, more people mine and the difficulty goes up. If the price goes down, less people mine, and difficulty goes down.
It is not so easy to make the case that difficulty influences price, though you could make this case: difficulty and price are both influenced by interest in bitcoin.
Can you list any other coincidences that have been going on for 4+ years with predictable results?
I'm not trying to say that network hashrate specifically dictates BTC trade price (last month's bubble is an obvious example) but to say they aren't related is just bogus.