I guess it depends on what you define as valuable... to me value comes from the amount of people using a token and not so much the speculative market of said token.
There are 39+ coins that higher valuation than steem, but out of those coins... How many of them actually get used? how many of them actually have a community, have transactions?
If we define valuation to be correlated to network effect, which in an healthy economy it is (money that is not used is valueless) then it's not such a crazy assertion to make.
In other words, the reason why I believe STEEM is undervalued is not specifically because of it's tech, but because of the people who are using it daily. This of course when I compare it to other tokens that don't serve any function at all, the ER20's, all the different bitcoins, etc.
I do however grasp your point... because it seems like many people when they say this come from a place of hope and not so much from deep analysis. Meaning, how did they reach their conclusion is yet to be determined.
I'm looking at it from a macro economic aspect... and in my limited knowledge, yes... we are undervalued.
The one impressive thing about Steemit during the bear market is that the flow content has not ceased, not to mention all the new and interesting dApps. And there seems to be new faces on the introduceyourself tags every single day. Most other coins don't seem to have that kind of growth.