That is a wonderul analysis. You said so many things without saying them and you outlined so many things that others might be afraid to say so..
You are right.. anyone with a huge following can now make a coin go up or down with their "expert analysis" and can make money hand over fist by buying those coins prior to announcing that they are going to go upward..
Sadly, since cryptos are still not regulated currencies so the laws of SEC do not apply, hence this criminal activity cannot be stopped..
The only thing we can do is stay safe and play safe in crypto world..
Yeah, I think at the end of the day you just have to hope the appreciation of value in the technology over the long term is going to be such that manipulation ends up being blips on the radar, and eventually I believe it will. The people who really lose out on these types of activity are the people who are trying to make big short term gains. For the long term holders, this type of activity ends up evening out over the long term. It is definitely scary watching your portfolio valuation jump all over the place.
Yes, regulation can stop a lot of unqualified financial advisors - just like those pump groups/channels/tweets etc...
But - as I have written in another comment (sorry for copy-and-paste of this 5 lines list..) we are trying to analyze a market featured by:
Prices are ruled, even more than in traditional and regulated markets, by psychologycal factors. so, as you perfectly said, "anyone with a huge following can now make a coin go up or down with their expert analysis". In traditional and regulated market, volatility is controlled also by two other factors:
In traditional market volumes are controlled by with hyper-tecnologic actors like High Frequency Traders https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.asp that can destroy markets for fractions of seconds but don't create a panic sell/panic buy (too fast, they only kill stop loss users). And in every case regulators - unless, as everytime happens, they are colluded - have the tecnologycal analysis tools and the lawful attributions to interview.
So yes, by this point of view we need of a stron regulation. Think also to all scammed users that now have left the market because there were no law and none kind of legal guarantee..