for me it's

J ZONE.

dude is slept on like crazy...but listen just to name a couple, listen to his work on tame one's 'rappers attack' and other early eastern conference AND his own albums... just disgustingly ill

and speaking of eastern conference MIGHTY MI...runner up for most slept on...

and just for the hell of it let's go old skool

MR MIXX from 2 live crew...absolutely revolutionary but never mentioned

who else?

buckwild

I'd say Dilla

i've allways liked joey chavez

i have to disagree there

Dilla is UNDERrated?

Blockhead, Fat Jon, Joey Beats or El P.

Cosign on Buckwild... most of the time. The earlier, grimey shit he did (Big L, OC, Artifacts) is top notch.

"JayLost"

Dilla is a valid point. Sadly He didn't gain most of his accolades or recognition till after He died. There's mad kids now completely biting his stye and techniques that didn't even know who he was till his death. The huge boom in roland sp sales after he passed is a perfect example,actually. So in that context,yea, you can say Dilla.
Nowadays theres a huge ammount of cats making some dope shit. My personal opinion though is that all the computer technology/software and newer model samplers/ keyboards with functions like autochop,etc has made it WAY to easy for a lot of kids to just jump in and make some respectable sounding beats, even while having no real firsthand knowledge of hip hop culture, and little knowledge of the history that's behind digging and beat making.
I gotta go back to the early 90's before every other person you know was calling themselves a producer-- Q-Tip. Along with his stuff for Tribe (Tip actually had WAY more to do with the production than Ali Shaheed), he also did work on classic albums for Nas, Mobb Deep,Busta Rhymes, Craig Mack, Jungle Brothers, Diamond D... and he isn't even looked at as a producer by most. He was also a big influence on Dilla himself when Jay was coming up, and was a huge innovater in the generation that made hip hop production what it is now.His newer solo shit is ill--and I hear he's done some new work for Jay-Z and Kanye--who by the way (Kanye) is MAD slept on by the "underground" crowd. No matter what you think of him, he's been breaking ground in his production from the jump.I mean producers have always used soul records, but all these chopped up soul beats didn't really exist in the way they do now till "Blueprint".

Man this is hard lol. I have to think some more while I'm doing some chores today, but I will agree about Q-Tip. His beats are always so super funky but most people forget he is a producer too. They just see him as a emcee.

most underrated=kno

the other guy in cannibal ox thats not vast or el-p... i dont even kno the cats name, but hes daf on that cold vein album.

edit... never mind this is for producers lol whatever.

oktopus from Dalek. nobody makes beats like that beast.