I tried hard to be the undertaker at a wedding, I really did.

I went to last week’s big MLP industry conference in Stamford, Conn. determined not to be swayed by pretty PowerPoint slides or by the fancy grub (although the beef medallions and the finger pastries were certainly worthy of “the hottest asset class on Earth.”)

I haunted the presentation halls and breakout rooms with my dour mien, sifting the soaring rhetoric and reassuring numbers for red flags. I posed awkward questions.

I asked Ken Owen, the chief financial officer of Oiltanking North America (which owns Oiltanking Partners (NYSE: OILT)), how much more we can expect from the long-running storage boom that’s compounded his  partnership’s revenue by more than 14 percent annually for the last five years. He said it was the early days, and pointed to all the expansion projects demanded by his customers, the ones renewing Oitanking contracts at a rate that would make even a private prison jealous.

I tortured poor Randy Burkhalter, the game vice president of investor relations for Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE: EPD), the largest MLP and pipeline operator in captivity, with curveballs about the risks of higher rates and overbuilding. He parried with excellent distribution growth, strong margins and a disarming acknowledgment that, duh, when rates rise MLPs will be in for some rough sledding.

We spoke while Wall Street was in the process of trying to divine when Federal Reserve might start to reduce its asset purchases. The very thought made the equity markets convulse. But I can tell you that the reaction from cozy confines of the Stamford Hilton was a giant yawn.

A determined contrarian (the kind that all too often loses money) might make the case that such complacency is a sign that a market top is in sight. The fact that this year’s conference drew 1,100 attendees — 300 more than last year’s — requiring extra presentation tracks and lunch shifts also suggests plenty of bullish sentiment.

But I emerged convinced that sentiment, if anything, continues to lag the sector’s strong fundamentals.

The MLP is just a tax structure, after all, and one that requires investors to hold units for a long time to reap the bulk of the advertised tax benefits. But midstream energy infrastructure, the sector dominated by MLPs is a real business and, at the moment, a real growth industry.

The shale drilling boom and the related reality of US fuel exports that will only increase in the coming years, demand a vastly different and expanded energy infrastructure.  As Burkhalter told me, midstream MLPs are meeting this strong demand with some of the cheapest capital available to any industry, investments that unlike the available fixed-income alternatives will generate distribution growth over time.

As is, the JPMorgan Alerian MLP Index ETN (NYSE: AMJ) retains a yield of 4.6 percent, not shabby at all for an industry with lots of room for growth, and certainly a better deal than the current 3.2 percent average for real estate investment trusts or the 2.1 percent yield for the 10-year Treasury, both of which lack the growth path available to MLPs.

The return profile for MLPs could be higher because, as one of the panel presentations at the conference made clear, MLP’s are still a very small niche of the investment universe, one lacking the broad institutional support enjoyed by REITs, to say nothing of bonds.

The retail investors who still contribute half of the aggregate MLP capital are getting not-so-gradually reinforced by institutions, pension funds and foreign investors who are just getting introduced to the sector in many cases. As this capital pours in, I would expect the MLP discount to REITs to narrow, just as the extra yield that MLPs currently provide relative to corporate and Treasury bonds is likely to shrink closer to the historic norm.

There will be lots of false alarms between the current blessed state of affairs and that hazy and unmercifully distant time when a booming economy forces the Fed to rapidly hike interest rates, squeezing MLPs and other income plays.

And the severity of that squeeze is far from a foregone conclusion.  Vanguard Natural Resources (NYSE: VNR) CEO Scott Smith answered a question about that by noting that Vanguard’s 8 percent yield is little changed from the fall of 2007, when the 10-year Treasury yield was above 4 percent.  The implication is that there’s no reason why a reversion to the mean in Treasury yields must jack up Vanguard’s, which has never much deviated from its own baseline.

Contrarians get paid, sometimes spectacularly, when they manage to anticipate important market turning points. But most of us stand a better chance of profiting by exploiting well established trends and market inefficiencies, which offer less of an ego boost but far more certainty.

US energy demand remains vast, production is growing rapidly and the trend toward fuel exports represents a massive opportunity. Chances are interest rates will remain unusually low a year from now given persistently high US unemployment, federal budget constraints  and the well known challenges facing Europe and China.

Of course, there’s some chance the economy really takes off between now and then. More likely, a year from now 1,500 conference attendees will still be wondering when the Fed will act, while sipping champagne.