The last ATH wasn't fueled by fundamentals or how well the foundation was managed. It was based on speculation and fomo, plus a bit of pumping from the WeChat rumor. The whole of the crypto market was pumped during that time on the back of the BTC highs and additional liquidity from selling off of free forked BCH. When the whole market has large price rises in the future, NEM will also rise along with the other alts.
Any technical enhancements and Catapult release will be a bonus.
Sure; question is, how "widespread-capable" this bonus will be (if any). We're for more than a month on #22 position, now we're slowly falling into #23 position on CMC. Lot of people mentioned that "there are a lot of crapcoins and doesn't matter about the CMC position". I partly agree - surely there are several crapcoins (coins with much less technical potential) in front of us. But - unfortunately - I think that for the "widespread" really matters, how high or low we're on the charts. Let's see all these Cointelegraph & so articles - if they elaborate and publish some articles or charts about the coins, they focused usually about TOP10 coins, TOP20 at maximum. Which means that we're out of radar now. Sad and ufair? Probably yeah, but that's how the real life goes. And I'm afraid if we'll not back in TOP20 soon, we'll fall into serious troubles, no matter how big and great will be Catapult (or any other part of NEM ecosystem) update. Let's see the history with NXT. I strongly hope that we'll not repeat the same scenario. And yes, despite of these hard and unclear times, I'm still hodling...