I agree the Hive rewards pool should never be removed. However I also believe that individual community tokens are the future. With any wider success Hive rewards will grow incredibly scarce, leading tribe type tokens to pick up the slack of rewarding engagement and giving average users a sense of stake, purpose, and progress.

I’m just very roughly estimating here... but I believe we have something along the lines of 20 million Hive going into the rewards pool yearly right now. That’s great when we only have about 10,000 active users... but imagine an even modest success of 10 million users. That means your average user earns 2 Hive per year! We’re spoiled by an early era of easy Hive right now and don’t think of its true scarcity.

So yes, alternative rewards pools will be a necessity by nature, but the Hive rewards pool is key to network stability as you mention, and the amount of Hive held by groups and communities serves as a backstop for their second layer token price.