If you're going to mine BTC, you're approaching BTC as a mid to long term investor since it generally takes at least a half of a year to pay off the cost of miners. So it wouldn't surprise me if a big portion, if not the majority, of the mining community are trying to time bottoms (before they buy miners and start operating them), when they perceive the best risk/ reward setups, giving themselves the best chance to come out profitable at the end of the expected profitability window (> 6 months).

If this is true, then more total hashpower joining the network is an indicator of a growing number of "a specific type" (the type who'd ever consider something like mining BTC, which is a very unique type) of people expecting bullishness in the mid to long term (6 months to a year/ year and a half...ish), which COULD be useful as a leading indicator of where price is going in the future, depending entirely on how accurate the aggregate (of those type of people) is as timing the bottoms.

My guess is that those who're interested in mining BTC in the first place are generally more forward thinking than your average BTC owner, more likely to see the bigger picture, probably more studied on what BTC is and where it is heading (technologically), etc, but does that equate to the aggregate of miners being a reliable indicator of where price is heading in x amount of time? I lean towards "probably", but I'm not aware of a way to reliably quantify whether or not that is actually the case (determining the strength of correlation between hashrate increase and price performance x amount of time beyond that point could be a starting point...).