I think price matters more than you make it sound. It gives people confidence to buy and/or invest, it puts bitcoin in a positive light and it makes corporations more willing to work with it. When people look at bitcoin right now, the first thing they say is "isn't it that currency that lost over 70% of its value?" You may be one of those people who can say "i don't care about price, I got in at $1 so I'm still up hehe" but let's think about other people too. They care about their money and they won't get involved with something that will make them lose money.
I can't judge what people say when they first look at bitcoin, but to me it looks like "isn't it the currency that grew 10,000% and then lost 90% then grew another 1000% then lost 70%? nice volatile opportunity to make lots of money". Everybody has their own reasoning, you can't just sum it up for everyone because it will be untrue. Bitcoin is, was, and will for a long time be extremely volatile. Whether or not people have balls to invest into it during it's low season just determines whether or not these people are able to make profits on the volatility.
But from a completely different point of view, we see large amount of businesses and business investments which happily develop infrastructure *not caring a single bit about what the price currently is*. And that's what matters, not how many new short-term profit seekers we can attract. They will run on the next dip, anyway. Infrastructure will stay. The "common people" will go where the infrastructure is the most convenient and use that.