Many people said that at that point the difficulty would be around 400k, 500k, 600k... BS! It's still below 280K!! Obviously the difficulty will grow considerably until the end of the year. But all predictions about the difficulty since the beginning of the year have gone VERY far from the truth. I'm expecting a considerable increase as I said, but people saying it will grow 3x until October... No way! Most people are mining other coins with L3+( forgot what CC
Well, the raise in difficulty of LTC is slowed down by other coins, there is going to be a tipping point though, where there aren't enough altcoins on scrypt to compensate the raise.
I.e. where there isn't enough market to liquidate them against BTC as a lot of pools instantly go for BTC or LTC.
At this point I'm with you on the fact that the difficulty is not as high as most people would expect.