Ideally there should be no hive/hive power/hive dollar reward for posts at all; billions of people post on Facebook without ever receiving any kind of payout, so what is their reason? With Hive-Engine and Communities, people are fully able to receive rewards in Hive-Engine tokens on their posts, and this incentive to post in a tribe/community already helps us find content we're looking for on Hive. If I want to find finance-based content, I go to Leo. If I want to look at photography, I go to the photography community, and so on.

The problem with Hive in my opinion is that the only way to acknowledge someone's post is to vote with hive power, and because our hive power is finite, we are selective in our votes. There's a psychological barrier of some kind in play here. If Hive gave the option (in addition to voting with hive power) to "like" someone's post, you might see a lot more engagement. Reddit employs this kind of system already, as does YouTube and Twitch. The difference with these platforms is that viewers/readers must directly give tokens/currency to authors and content creators.

On the surface it seems like Hive is a better system because we get to have our cake and eat it too. We can "give" authors hive power through our votes, while getting to keep our own hive power and getting some more as well. Like you are alluding to however, if everyone is doing this, then no one is actually gaining anything in the long run. We might be increasing our hive power nominally, but in terms of real value, not really. In retrospect, Hive (Steem) would have been better off using the system that other platforms have now adopted, where you could gift hive to authors if you wanted to, and have upvotes/downvotes not tied in any way to a reward system (other than the reward of engagement and attention). This in turn would cause people to buy Hive tokens for the sole purpose of rewarding authors, and in turn increasing the velocity of the Hive currency inside of the ecosystem.

I'm not poo-pooing on the current model of Hive and Hive Power, but it would make more sense to do away with hive power altogether. Maybe that sounds radical, but the writing has been on the wall for some time. I started powering down a month ago to leave my Hive as liquid for all the reasons mentioned above and in the OP. The Annual return by staking Hive and utilizing auto-voting is a very large nail in Hive's coffin in the long run. I personally think the entire Hive Power model is flawed, and clearly I'm not the only who's been thinking this over. I can make a much larger return sitting on liquid hive and catching periodic price spikes and dips, and in truth I'm probably going to reward extremely well done posts with liquid hive from now on and utilize my soon-to-be-worthless upvote to acknowledge posts I like in the same way I would on Facebook or Youtube.

I've said over and over for years that it's a bad idea to market Hive (or Steem prior) to people on the premise that they can make money by posting. Much like socialism, if there's no production of wealth to begin with, then everyone is going to be equally poor. Hive has proven once again you can't spin straw into gold. If it were not true, Facebook would have adopted a reward system years ago to match Hive's.

Hindsight is 20/20. Is it too late for Hive to change its model to be more inclusive and engaging? Maybe. I haven't lost faith in the platform just yet, and there are many who find the current model rewarding in more ways than one, but I'm sadly not one of them anymore. I suppose there is a fear that if the Hive Power reward system were done away with, then Hive would be just like any other platform. This is not true of course, as Hive is a decentralized commons for content creators that is free of censorship. Hive is also a place where one can tokenize digital goods to sell to others. Hive has DApps and communities and token markets and many other qualities that give the ecosystem great value.

Hive power, curation and post rewards are not the heart and soul of Hive anymore. Maybe the reward system was at the beginning when Steem first was born, but most of the value has moved elsewhere into DApps and tokens. At this point, Liquid Hive is to the Hive ecosystem as Bitcoin is to the Crypto market, and I just don't see the value in powering it up any longer. Seeing this post by blocktrades validates what I'd previously concluded in my own head about Hive Power and the reward system. It will be interesting to see where the wind blows with the community as a whole.