I feel like your analysis is spot on.  I feel quite strongly that the market is open to this manipulation due to incredibly low levels of actual adoption.  When people and companies hold tokens to power mission-critical applications, there will be much less price volatility.  The vast majority of people holding crypto see it as a speculative instrument, and have never even used a distributed application.  We need crypto to have intrinsic value due to real world use cases.  Until that happens, we all get whiplash.