Difficulty will be lower because some miners will find it hard to run their hardware bacuse of grid power bills and also the ASIC miners will be a lot cheaper, I still think the best time to invest in a ASIC miner is in a blood market.
Those who set up miners when BTC was at $15,000 years back did very well already, cheaper hardware and more BTC that ended up having better value. This is my own way.
It's a different time for mining now. Large corporations are buying lucrative contracts for electricity or building their own energy plants. More than 90% of mining costs will be electricity costs.
Large companies are also buying ASICs at big discounts.
Small miners have no chance in this business. It's easier for them to buy bitcoins than to mine them.
I think it's the way developers want things to be because they can just create a new Asic miner that takes less power or retain the high power with massive hashrate, but all this things are calculation based.
Mining will be easier if you have money to set up green energy and be willing to wait for years to get all the money back, I accept that mining isn't for the small boys anymore, they are better just buy some BTC and hold for few years.
If I have 10k right now I think it's best to buy Bitcoin, rather than buying two or more Asic miners, electricity consumption is killing, it takes good calculation first before proceeding to order for Asic miners.