Project quality and marketing programs are really important, as long as the project creates enough noise in the market and gets the attention of major exchanges, combined with the big bosses, the project will certainly be priced relatively high in the market, it is not known how much it will increase but higher than expected price is normal. However, the basic theory in this analysis also cannot compare with the needs of whales, they can confuse investors like us and misidentify prices, so I rarely dare to venture into new projects even when they make huge profits.
Marketing could be used for shady stuff as well, that is why you have to be very careful about what you are getting into. For the defi world, I can say that getting audited is very important, especially when Certik audits a place they rarely run away, who would build something that would pass an audit and makes them insane amount of profit? Plus, it is decentralized so the money they could run away with would become very small compared to what they could make if they wait.
Moreover, we are dealing with something that is not definite, we do not have exact data to locate how much it should worth, we do not have anything that would be like "if x happens then price is y" type of deal, so there is nothing we can do to actually calculate it. In fact there is nothing that calculates bitcoin price future neither, we do not know what will happen with any of them.