Wouldn't that pump UP the difficulty as more miners are being used?
Of course it would.
ONe thing that is having an effect IMO, its all these non-mining mining ponzi's. If only a small fraction of the coins thrown to them went to actual mining hardware or legit cloudmining, we wouldnt be seeing quite this stagnation. And of course, it wont last either way, at the latest its a matter of when the next gen bitfury, KnC, AM, CT, bitmain and spondoolies rigs hit with a power efficiency thats several times better than current hardware. Bitfury 0.2J/GH was supposed to happen this year.