First the available tournament data is very small.
It is "small", but it is also large enough that we can start seeing general trends.
As far as I know there have been no non-comped tournaments, though I don't really follow the tournament scene so I could be wrong on that.
Define comp. A "rule of three" comp (which seems to be at least "not uncommon" will have little to no bearing on the inclusion of state troops.
Secondly the group think could (and likely has) impacted the tournament scene. Like people claim that state troops are overpriced and yet the tournament army that we know won a tournament heavily used state troops.
One data point means absolutely nothing and should be seen as nothing but anecdotal evidence at best. The thing about the group (I mean tournament players) is that they are generally quick to learn what works and what doesn't.
The only way to test if they are overpriced or not (in a tournament setting) would be for a number of tournaments to be played with Empire armies that contained a reasonable number of state troops.
Given the superior efficiency of other choices in the Empire list the "reasonable" number of state troops is likely the bare minimum.
There are no experienced players in TOW. This is a Faux Aimee. Players think because they are experienced in 8th edition or 7th edition or 6th edition they can safely evaluate TOW but this is not accurate. TOW has very different interactions compared to 8th/7th/6th edition.
The very core of the game remains the same as it always has. While a player might not be "experienced" with ToW in the same way they are with an older edition the general principles still apply and conclusions can be made based off of those. If other troops do the same job or better job as state troops but at a lower cost then that points to the state troops being overpriced.
There are many examples of this. I will just give one.
Many people stated that the priest in TOW is overpriced to the point of useless (regardless of whether or not it is a priest of sigmar or a priest of Ulric). However I wonder how many of those people considered (in their comparison to priests in 8th and 7th editions) that the priest's prayers are unstoppable and that the priest is untargetable but the opponent. On the surface the priest looks very similar to the priests of pervious editions but in reality they are not.
Bad analysis IMO. The priest of old brought channeling of power/dispel dice as well as the real deal, i.e. Hatred for the whole unit against everything. The prayers were mostly a tactical way of drawing out opponents dispel dice in the "mini game" called Magic Phase in 8th edition.
It is true that the ToW priests prayer cannot be stopped, but with Ld 7/8 the odds of those going off are not great and fall into the same box as those in 8th edition, i.e. nice when they go off but cannot be trusted to do so. Magic resistance seems to be generally better in this edition, so that is some real value.
Had they still been Ld 8/9 then for their price-point I feel they would be a viable option.