In reality, I believe that retail will be of little importance in this cycle. In the last cycle we started talking about institutional adoption, and it is true that it started then, but I think that when it is going to be noticed, when there is going to be real institutional adoption, it is going to be in this cycle. So, whether there are more or less retail investors, I think it will have little impact when compared to institutions buying (or selling) billions.
I agree with you in terms of Bitcoin and major alts (esp ETH and Sol) but what about the other alts and shitcoins? I can't see institutions buying those.
Yes, no support from any type of investments, in fact not even SOL, I think btc and eth are the only ones that big companies could buy, and that would make sense considering how big those coins are and the top two, and been around for many years without much issues.
However, I do not think that others will be bought by big companies. What will happen, is that retail have money in big names too, and big companies will put some money too, it will get hyped, the price will go up, people will realize they made as much as they can from the big ones, and they will use some of the profits to buy some smaller stuff, since smaller coins and tokens have lower market cap, it will be easier to make them move higher with a little bit of money and hype, and those low alts will go up because of that.