The first 4-10 years of investing and building an investment portfolio might seem kind of boring because it seems to take a long time to really build up value, so measuring how you are building it up and figuring out your various strategies might contribute towards feelings of impatience and frustration... and like you suggested, if you are investing a few thousand per year because you are still building, it could take you 4-10 years before you start to get to a sizeable amount of somewhere between $20k and $50k.. and where you might start to feel some of the compounding effects.. yet even compounding effects are likely to take even longer than 10 years before you start to feel them in terms of the size of your investment portfolio.
So surely these periods of "down" prices are opportunities to buy - but at the same time, many of us likely realize and appreciate that there are a lot of people who are losing their abilities to feel comfortable investing and/or to feel that they have a sufficient amount of extra cash that they can invest... .so in that regard, sometimes the extra cash is going towards increases in expenses, even the basics food, lodging, energy (utilities/transportation)..
Nonetheless, there are always ways to buckle down and to focus on how to invest, such as investing in bitcoin... or even another matter of various ways to invest in yourself and to attempt to improve your current lot or your future earning potential (if you are young)... so yeah.. strong hands are buying.. but if they might feel that they do not have a lot of cash they also may be figuring out ways to increase the strength of their hands.
Often, with an increase of income, people's expenses increase, they understand that they can buy something that they have long dreamed of, and perhaps if this is some kind of reward for themselves for the ability to increase their income, this is not bad, but if they start spending additional income on everyday needed, buy more food, or more clothes, or whatever, if it's not very important, it's not very good. If people used to do without it, then why spend on it now? I hear people say that you don't need to deny yourself and try to save money, you need to learn how to earn more. To some extent I agree, you need to maintain a good standard of living to be comfortable, but when it comes to earning more, well, I dont mind earning more, but learn to channel this additional income into the right investments and increase in this way their chances of becoming self-reliant and independent. But this is the choice of everyone, someone likes to live for today and not worry too much about what will happen tomorrow, and someone wants to be sure of tomorrow and does not want to spend their whole life on work. So strong hands will buy, strong hands are very good, but even better combination of strong hands with a smart head.
Perhaps for some, the first years of investing will be boring, I dont know, it will soon be a year since I started investing in bitcoin, for me this time has passed very quickly, it seems that several months have passed. To some extent, I am glad that this was a bear market year, it passed in favorable conditions for investing. I'm looking forward to seeing how my investment will grow when the bull market comes back.