Beautiful well built hardware is great but it does no good if btc price keeps falling and difficulty keeps going up. How good is a miner if BTC goes sub $100 and it costs more to power the thing than it earns.

Miners need to shut down but as long as people speculate that
BTC will rise in the future they will continue to mine at a loss today.
I am not sure they will continue to mine. It is more profitable to switch off older equipment and buy bitcoin than spend electricity at loss making J/BTC cost basis.
Its normal at any given time that people will be switching off previous gen equipment as newer more electrically efficient equipment pushes old hardware below electrical breakeven with sunk cost economics (ie even losing money based on electrical cost, ignoring purchase cost).
Same thing happened to CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs... now its the turn of old gen ASICs.
Once they adapt difficulty will flatten or even fall, sell pressure will relieve and price will rise. Flatter difficulty will help also because it extends equipment life-time which makes planning easier.
Thats what I think anyway.
Adam