Some Economics:

The market for value is set by what people decide to exchange in return for it. If Time and Energy are a basis of value, this becomes the foundation for people to decide what something is "worth" when computing their personal value equation.

Let's say Person A may had to spend X amount of time and consumed some amount of energy from food, and in return received some value, let's say fiat currency. So Person A has converted time and energy into transferable, stored time and energy.

Person A now faces a choice - how will they exchange their stored time and energy for something of value. Some of this stored time and energy will go towards survival - acquiring more energy (food), water, shelter and self-protection . What ever is left over can be exchanged for literally any other form of value, with the magnitude of the value received being completely arbitrary. Prices for things find equilibrium when you have a lot of personal value judgements clustering around a particular number, i.e. lots of people agreeing, based on how much of their stored time and energy they are willing to exchange for something, on what that something is actually "worth".

Steem has a dynamic market price continuum because there are lots of people continuously agreeing on what it's worth, and that's all that really matters. That market price is made up of everyone's value judgement of Steem, including but not limited to: it's use as an incentive to curate a social network, as a reward for content creators, speculation on increased future utility, etc.

There is never a "correct" price for anything, there is only the price that something is at every moment in time.

I personally believe that "fundamental" or "intrinsic" value does not exist - because value is always the sum of a group of individuals' completely arbitrary value equation. If you cannot know or predict every individuals value equation, then you can never derive a price, you must accept the price (and thus the implied value) as an emergent property of the thing.