As it was not an attack on BTC (any BCH pump seems very suspicious for me) that can be concidered as a some kind of correction after a pretty big growth. I'm sure that it is pretty good and it will help from the psychological side: a lot of people are waiting for the end of this year to see the final BTC rate and they can easily dump it especially if it is uncorrected. If bitcoin will continue its slow growth it will just make the situation more calm.
I also don't considered that it is a well planned attack by the other side. But you can't eliminate the coincidence once more. Anyways, bitcoin has since recovered, while Bitcoin Cash is still pumping closing it at 50% now. LOL. That's an amazing run. But we absolutely know what's coming. It will crash so hard that it will go back to $1500 once more. If I were the some casual noobs, I will not buy it at top price because you will just trap inside this pump and instead of profits, you might end up losing more because you are swayed by this pump.
Also we should have a workable Lightning Network up and running by the end of 2018.
The major rises of 2017 were all about lightning network (segwit, recent lightning beta on mainnet, etc...).
Development (and adoption?) of lightning / off-chain transactions will have an incredible effect on the BTC price.
Since you have mentioned Lightning Network, I'm all ears. LOL. I still like the idea of this sidechains, I'm not that technical anymore, but I think implementing it will really help us soothe the current issue that we are facing. So it ever this will be activate next year, we are going to see the price picking up once more and touching $20,000. But we will have to see, I'm sure resistance will be present, but I'd say give LN a chance to see if it can improved the high transaction fees and slow confirmation time.