The price of ETH will continue to dwindle with the poor performance of ICOs at the moment and with ICO project teams dumping insane amounts of ETH on the exchange, not forgetting the scam projects as well. If ETH is going to experience any price gains, I think at this point it's only going to be drive by Bitcoin and the road to recovery will be long and rough
Most probably you are right. The only thing that could help buck the trend is ETH 2.0 but who knows when that will actually come to fruition. ETH like most alt-coins now is just dependent on bitcoin for a recovery. Once BTC starts to trend upwards people will also regain confidence in alts.
All existing coins depend heavily on what happens to Bitcoin. The price of Etherum is also greatly influenced by the price movements of Bitcoin and that cannot be avoided. The influence of Bitcoin is very large in the crypto world, for all of us who hope that there will be a price increase on Etherum then we must also support the growth of the use of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the beginning of the crypto world, let's use Bitcoin and the price of Etherum will increase automatically.
I don't agree that coins prices will just increase indefinitely if BTC's price is doing so because it is being adopted. They'll still have to have something to offer. Right now ETH has that but if it is replaced by another coin as the leader for smart contracts, dapps and ICOs then its price is unlikely to ever recover.