But you can't use ripple unless you have xrp - they have to give it away. You can't buy ripples unless you have ripples already.
No average Joe will use ripple if Ripple don't give them free xrp.
Yes and no, yes they will give away quite a bunch, but at which rate?
I agree that current market prices are influenced by the sub sequential reduction of the rate they are given away on the forum. And once there is another giveaway prices might drop.
Now the assumption that the average joe won't use ripple unless it's gratis is flawed.
Think of this of how Second Life works: Linden Dollars are both traded on the market and supplied by Linden labs, the most straight-forward way to do this is for opencoin to sell XRP via credit card.
There would also be third party sites which sell them at a semi-fixed rate just like coinlab does.
They clearly have a long term business model - and I don't doubt the price of xrp plays a big role in this - but they have to reach a point of critical mass, where a good portion of the world's population have enough ripples to do business on ripple.
They are currently taking advantage of bitcoin users who are used to these cryptocurrencies (we enjoy playing this game) - they are using us as guinea pigs (and it's costing us more than a guinea).
Once we build their system with our involvement, and attract more users into an increasingly useful money transfer system, they will start to impart pressure on the value of xrp in order to make it trivial for Joe to enter this payment system.
They will manipulate the currency supply to their hearts content so as to maximize their long term profits.
(I've just persuaded myself that ripple is a scam. But a very useful scam that may change everything.)