well you watch the income, ill watch my total return from both. a falling share price on a dividend payer isnt any better than a falling non dividend payer. especially if they fall the exact same amount in total return.
Your math may be correct, but we all know a lot of this stuff ain't always about math. Otherwise, we'd all have 100% of our money in the stuff that has averaged double digit returns over the past 100+ years (stocks).
Anyway, I think folks do need to be careful about jumping on the dividend bandwagon. Wasn't too long ago that folks wouldn't be caught dead with anything but those "new" economy stocks. Some fools even wrote stuff about Warren Buffet being left behind. And dividend paying stocks can go down in value and they can stop paying.
Here's one (there are many, many more...just Google stock aristocrats)
Chevron
Late 1990s it was trading in the $30s & $40s and paying just over $1 per year in dividends. Today it goes for $90+ a share and it's paying over $3 per share in dividends. That's an effective yield of about 10% if you didn't reinvest (heaven forbid you reinvested and compunded those suckers. You'd still be getting $3 per share, but your # of shares would have grown and the fact that the price per share more than doubled is almost too good to believe )
And as far as income goes, there is some interesting stuff out there about reverse dollar cost averaging and sequence of returns when it comes to generating income.
I can tell that you are sharp and you're likely to do just fine. Dividends ain't magic, but they do have a nice way of helping an investor hang in there during some rough times.