Thing about steem though, is there's so many ways to make money with it. If you're talking about investing and just letting your money appreciate in value passively, then yes other cryptos have risen more (and this doesn't say much about what might happen in the future).

But if you delegate your money in some curation group, you will earn curation rewards (again, passively). If you are active on the platform, you will again earn money constantly, comparable to a regular salary for some people here. This is basically the equivalent of mining, which in other cryptos would be prohibitively costly to pursue and would require investment in hardware, whereas here all you need is a keyboard.

(I know you know all this, just reiterating.)

So if you factor in all those considerations, maybe steem(it) isn't such a bad investment prospect.

And then there's lucky (and unexplainable) situations like we have now with SBD, where your SBDs are basically worth 10 times as much! There's people I interact with daily here who have gone from 1000 dollars account-worth to over 10,000 in a span of a couple weeks. Unlike them I'm using this opportunity to diversify to other cryptos rather than power up, which is why I asked about cryptos you might recommend.

I had already checked out Cardano, and what worries me is their competition seems to be Ethereum, and I have too much faith in Ethereum! Whatever problems they have, they will likely iron out, just like Btc will do with faster and cheaper transaction times with the lightning network and Segwit etc. So Cardano might be a good investment short-term (just like Dash and Litecoin are as long as Btc remains with the same issues) but I don't know about long-term.

I love Cardano's scientific approach, but they're a little bit late in the game it seems to me.