And secondly, does anyone believe this is a long-term change (the drop in price) or is this merely temporary?
It's temporary. It may last for long, even several months but it's always temporary. If we see another bull. Run to $20k the transactions will increase along with that, and mempool will become congested again. Right now there are very few transactions compared to what it was 1-2 months ago. This is the primary reason for the drop in fees, while yes segwit helped a lot but still segwit adoption is way too less.