You wrote a lot of things i agree with.

However, i still doubt that those guys are the ones who hold the price down.
In case they are not good in marketing or as you suggest, in anything, how would they be able to manage such a thing? Or do you think they intentionally messed up all the marketing and the multipool delay is also intented? Evil genius?
If you could start a massive rise in price just by stopping the dumping, you could make more profit w/o trying to amass coins with those tiny daytrading margins that are available now... since holding the price down too long can be very very risky if you want to stay in the game - in the end you've got all coins and not a single buyer since everybody lost interest.

If i was forced to bet my money on a scenario, i would still think that there are some guys cashing out slowly (if you watched the last week you will see hardly a single dump below 28502). That takes it's time, but if you want to exit you do not need to care about how this affects other and smaller holders or future investors.