Your observation was right on Ether price going down last year but not to the level it has fallen to this year. Ether really has a lot of challenges in EOS, NTY and XRP and its smart contract is the most attacked as there are new blockchains that are doing 500TPS compare to ether's 7 TPS. But Ether will be undergoing hard fork early next year which will really impact on the fortune of ethereum.