If there is a drop in hashing power/miner, the difficulty will decrease and therefore it would be a wise idea to buy hardware.
At this time and age wouldn't it be cost effective for manipulation by a bitcoin hardware seller? What I mean is a organized DDOS in order to make it look like there is less miners, thus people will think it will be easier to mine and will buy hardware?
Then when they shipout the hardware they stop the DDOS.

I hope this is not the case.