I agree - I'm wary of steampunk for steampunk's sake as generally it doesn't have much to offer beyond the aesthetic. I read Ann & Jeff VanderMeer's anthology "Steampunk" and was really struck by their argument in the introduction and rationale for selecting the stories.
They felt (I paraphrase) that steampunk works best when it draws upon the social context of the time and uses that as a way to challenge current ideas or set up parallel universes in which to explore some issues.
The stories in the anthology were so much more than cogs, pistons, monocles and dashing derring-do (though there was a lot of that as well, and no complaints there) -- my personal favourite is Ted Chiang's "Seventy-two letters" which takes the Victorian understanding of the mechanics of conception and inheritance (that each sperm contains a tiny human foetus, and each male foetus already contains within him the seeds of future generations, those within him contain the next, and so on, while the womb merely provides the growing environment) PLUS the technical basis of golems (automata, of whatever material, controlled by sacred texts), and combines them in the setting of Victorian-era class warfare, social darwinism and capitalism and makes a really beautiful, elegant and thought-provoking story. (well, 5 years after reading it I'm still recommending it to people, which is rare for me).
I enjoyed the Murmurous Palaeoscope for the same reason - it used the aesthetics of steampunk in an integral functional way, and incorporated aspects of the social context, to make the story a lot stronger, and the characters a lot more relatable (to me) than if the protagonist had been (for example) an more straightforward Indiana Jones type.