On the bright side, this has been a great test of etheriums scalability. Which isn't great, but when this mining craze dies down I won't hesitate to run ethminer when I'm not home for a little extra dough.

What I would really expect is an overreaction to the price crash, which means the difficulty rate might drop a lot. At this point, doing what a lot of people do with bitcoin - mining small amounts for a long period of time and just holding it until it reaches all time highs to cash out - is probably really easy money.

Probably most relevantly is how crypto valuations are bound together. Bitcoin is also down about 20% from its ATH, and will certainly drop more as long as eth pulls it down. The entire market will rise and fall on the hype of just one blockchain. Coins nobody even cared about like peercoin saw 5x returns on miners during this eth bubble.