Sounds like continuous scope increase. :)

Would it make sense to leave out anything non-essential in Hivemind for after the initial release? My understanding is that non-critical bugs, optimizations and such can be addressed at any point in time - potentially after the hardfork, as continuous iterative improvements (something which hasn't been feasible to do for the blockchain code).

I am concerned that as these optimizations are being made, we are losing out greatly by not spending that time on adding Hivemind features which could make a tremendous difference for the platform. Here are some examples of such community-building features, but I'm sure ideas can be sourced from existing communities to see what will help them grow and offer incredible value to people currently using other platforms.