The ICO craze is not helping with this aspect either. How convenient is it to create a coin out of thin air (with all due respect) and cash in hundreds of millions?

Where is the actual worth? In the user base. Therefore I believe in steem. Look at whatsapp, when it got sold for 19 billion dollar, this price was based on nothing else then the user base. A cryptocurrency is nothing when it doesn't have users. Speculation is temporary.