Sadly, it's going to take more than the recent price dips to help GPU prices - last time things didn't calm down until profits dropped by another 50% or so (you can check out
Whattomine to see how much each card makes in profit mining different coins) - this could be a combination of price action or difficulty growth, but I suspect that since none of the manufacturers want to be holding the bag on excess inventory, we're just going to have to wait for next-gen chips or use APUs to get reasonably priced graphics.
A couple notes - if you *are* getting a GPU, you can mine in the background when you're not using it to offset the costs. It depends on how expensive your power is, but might make a lot of sense. I bought a GTX 1080Ti before the latest price runup and it should pay for itself in a couple more months doing that, which is actually pretty neat (at least in the winter when it's offsetting my heating bill anyway).
Oh, generally, people aren't very good at math on this whole mining thing - historically, it's been rare for GPU mining to crypto-ROI, and that's still the case today (when there are periods of really short dollar-ROIs it's because cryptos are also going up in price and you'd almost always be better buying the crypto directly if that's what you wanted to do). Also, in a year or so (maybe less time), Ethereum will be switching fully over to proof of stake, which will crash the price of mining and will probably mean a glut of cheap used cards...
Cryptocurrencies (blockchains, distributed ledger technologies) are actually super interesting, but we're in silly season / the start of a big bubble right now. It might not burst for a while though, although there's enough scammage going on that, well, who knows.
