By programmer headcount, our Hive-focused team is actually larger than Steemit's was :-) We just don't have the marketing/comms guys, we leave that to other groups. But it is true that we're working on a bunch of other things in Hive and I think HBD is mostly "good enough" after the last hardfork changes.

I think the current rules for HBD will allow it to operate in a reasonably tight range around the peg. About the only big risk to HBD stability now is the haircut rule (which is what allowed the price to go down to about 0.89 USD briefly even though we never reached the point where the haircut rule would take effect) and I think we can further reduce that risk by moving the allowed supply of HBD before haircut from 10% to 20% of total supply. Fortunately, that's a really simple change, and we can probably include it into the next hardfork.