People still think difficulty & mining stuff actually has any substantial affect on the price..
It has a huge effect on the price. saying mining doesn't affect the price is like saying that shorting doesn't affect a stock's price.
I guess that depends on what you mean. Block rewards have significant impact on price. There are ~11.8M BTC in existence, and ~4k being pumped out each day (higher than 3.6K "target" because of rapidly increasing hashpower on network, which 2-week difficulty adjustment window is too slow to accurately adjust for). That's ~.000339% daily inflation, and I'd guess ~75% of that quickly turns back into cash to purchase more miners or to "cash out" - but that's an out-of-ass guess, no clue what the real numbers are there. Assuming 75% "cash-out rate," and daily exchange volume of right around 40KBTC, they make up ~7.5% of the daily transaction volume.
While that's significant, that simply isn't enough influence (rather, there isn't enough new coin generation) to really determine the price (though it creates downward pressure), so price instead determines how much hashpower is on the network (though this correlation is currently broken due to disruptive ASIC tech - but once upfront ASIC prices are negligible compared to electricity costs again, this correlation will come back). Miners only had a "huge" impact on price - where they alone could set the price - back in the first year or so of Bitcoin, when the number of coins produced per day was really substantial, and Gox would've been majorly impacted by a dump of the day's 7.2K coins.
Mining (rather, block rewards) do still give Bitcoin a high rate of inflation (annually ~2x that of the USD, currently - depending on which numbers you trust), but that impact is steadily decreasing, and will become very small at the next halving (when annual inflation will likely be less than the USD). The halving after that, BTC inflation will be negligible.
