Where we may disagree is I posit that the price of the coin is related to the cost of the mining investment in it annually, modulated by the percentage of the float added each year by mining...
...As to whether higher prices (i.e. via usership demand) drive more investment in mining, I posit that network effects and the Metcalf law correlation that Peter R showed are driven more by the investment in mining, than vice versa...
...so when the investors are not also the miners early on then there is a loss of synergy...
Related yes, but causality only runs in one direction and it is toward mining not away from it. Empirical evidence (which is hiding on this forum somewhere unless the author deleted it, which I doubt, but I can't find it) is that mining is driven by price, not the other way around. That is to say, you get the mining demanded by those who compete to hold the coin by driving up the price; you don't get the price driven higher by more mining.
This is probably true for all the existing crypto-currencies, and if true, I posit this is because users are not mining with their sunk costs. Thus investors who don't mine are in dominant control of the price. Unfortunately I posit that this appears to cause suboptimal adoption rate and future, e.g. log-logistic.
Whereas, if the users of the coin are mining with sunk costs, I expect the price of the coin wouldn't factor as much in their decision to mine or not. And then there is fact that people who mine coins professionally are unlikely to sell them for less than their cost of mining. Thus the more you drive the hashrate up by popularizing mining, the higher the ask price of the coin. Then the investors who don't mine are no longer the only factor modulating the price.
This doesn't answer the question of what does create and drive demand for the coin, just what doesn't (mining).
Unfortunately you are correct that all existing crypto-currencies don't have the requisite synergy with mining. Bitcoin may have had it early on which resulted in a rocket shot logistic adoption curve (using price as a proxy). But this fell to log-logistic as the mining synergy was lost with GPU mining and then more so with ASICs mining.
Thus I am of the opinion that so far all we have are investment pump assets, not currencies.