Right now, bitcoin doesn't work well. Pseudo-4MB or not. Well, that's more or less what happened: bitcoin is now at 1/3 of the market cap, the forking fear is gone, bitcoin now has two viable clones in the top 20 and as far as I know, bitcoin is still at its 1 MB block limit after the segwitx2 failure, no ?
Nope. Since the Segwit's activation, its theoretical size would be about 2MB (if everyone uses Segwit). The size concept is now based on the transaction weight which doesn't require a hard fork. Isn't the prices affected mostly by the problem with the regulations?
Given the competition of bitcoin cash, and the fact that bitcoin, finally, did fork, rendered the power monopoly of Core moot. When it will have become a moot point, I guess suddenly for core, the holy 1 MB block limit will not be a problem any more, they will invent another narrative.... and it won't matter any more, because they overplayed their hand, split bitcoin over their pet story, and removed bitcoin as the market monopolist. Which is a very good thing. Brand monopoly is a bad thing, and competition improves everyone.
I'm not particularly fond of hard forks for Bitcoin. It's a lot harder to do than a soft fork. Lightning network could help with the issue.
I would say that the fact that the prices of the other coins are so high could be because of Bitcoin's name. Afterall, they do contain "Bitcoin". Would be safe to say that their trading volume is due to miners and those coins being brought over with the fork.