Imho, the way in which a coin is mined makes no difference to a coin's value. PoW coins are not backed by energy, but by the community.
Or else why would Litecoin's price be a few times lower than its ATH, while its hashrate is ridiculously higher than it was at that time?
What gives a coin value is the community's consensus, and it seems fitting that it's the coins community (the holders) who would get the new coins by securing the network, rather than relying on our block reward being high enough to attrack multipool miners who don't care about the future of the coin. And it seems more and more true that ASIC companies are the only one to truly profit from mining; that leads to centralization which is the opposite of what cryptocurrencies should be about.
I can guarantee that you can not produce a bitcoin under $400 today so you have a base value then you have to add all sort of other factors to get to todays price.
Litecoins price is a few times lower for a number of reasons and one of them is that ASICs produce a coin much more efficient and so can be sold much cheaper as if produced with GPU
Unfortunately, ASICs is one thing Satoshi did not foresee, but PoW coins it is truly honest money as you can not cheat and dont need anyone's consensus. Community's consensus, yep the Government needs it and gives fiat value and not honest money like PoW coins.
Even if, right now, a Bitcoin can not be produced under $400, it still needs community consensus to stay above that price. A crash to 200$ could happen, and difficulty would adapt so a Bitcoin could be produced at that price. And ASIC companies who have access to cheap miners and electricity can propably produce them at a considerably lower price anyways. Because of this, I think it's wrong to say that PoW gives a base value to a coin.
And there is no way to cheat with PoS either; everybody gets the same interest rate for protecting the network.
I am open to both POW and POS, but POW is working for bitcoin from start, and POS is still young and needs validation over time (in sense of market sentiment and acceptance). Is it worth to improve security with POS but at the same time introduce new (unknown at the time) risk factors?