with all the projects being built on steem, and alongside steemit, there will be a lot more attention on the protocol and therefore the coin. i would agree that if the crypto market keeps growing fast, Steem will benefit. 

I agree with your comment that steem does not have anything to prove with respect to the tech and initial use case. put simply, it's a reality as of today, not a dream. 
on the other hand, the big vision for steem is to power every website with an SMT. i.e. changing the internet as we know it. this is commonly referred to as "web 3.0" in their papers. If we think about the big vision, there is a ton to prove. HF 20 is late. SMTs are late. 

Finally, the steem token is in a number of funds, including William Mougayar's. This is critical to know as most big investors are likely to allocate their capital to funds as opposed to managing their own portfolio of coins. Capital inflows into funds leads to funds scaling up their portfolio. more demand for the underlying coins. if you track asset flows into funds and know their portfolios, you can likely do very well!