how long and how flat?
The whole scenery changed like crazy. There are too many newcomers, too many businesses, too many companies investing. Trading wise, it will crash, pretty hard in a snowball effect. But the confidence in the tech would make the recover less long than 2013 I would bet. With platform like Steem that let you earn cryptocurrencies in other way than mining, we have now a support that didn't exist before. It would be even better if those tokens sold in ICO were usable now but that is another issue.
I am much more careful in the way I invest since since summer :-).
Yes, things are getting faster and more intense. If BTC falls just 10%, countless billions in crypto marketcap will be lost, a huge loss in absolute terms. Nevertheless, as you have pointed out, people can still remain in crypto just by writing on Steemit or running BOINC or staking with a PoS altcoin wallet (i.e. things they normally do anyway) which keeps them in the game and makes future reinvestments more likely.