Thank you deeply, wizard friend. You more than anyone are usually at the brunt of my questions, pestering, and pulling together devrel/devops/tech support, when I am sourcing immediate troubleshooting for exchanges, node runners, and integrations, and who end up often basically having to watch me work through the "invisible" tasks. Working with, around, and for core team as well as all of our dapps has become an everyday thing that hasn't been able to go far enough to really get over the hump of tackling many of the things that our everyday userbase and builders complain that Hive (as a brand entity, let's say) doesn't have. Our dapps and services are already building the products that should be our frontline for onboarding, aggregation theory, and distribution, and they need to be able to focus on their own needs so they can become self sustainable. The protocol itself needs to keep up with what they're doing, and not rely on them to have to do additional "selling of Hive" while they're already competing in an ever growing market.

"Recognition" per se is secondary here, and I think this is probably at the absolute heart of a lot of the really knee jerk concerns which are pretty justified. Instead of spending years and the last... four? annual updates discussing at length on and off chain what the best approach would be to creating a way to push this work into full time and create standards for things that don't quantify with MAU/DAU/PRICE targets, it should have just been "Do you want me to throw aside all other work and use and funds allocated to focus on Hive full time for the next 2 full years, Y/N?" Most people these days are using an LLM to summarize information density like this, and it turns out what that that means what they get out the other end of the bananaphone is "pay me for a few pictures of me on stage." Blergh.

There's a surprising amount of users who really support the proposal, and a few who also really don't, who have messaged me directly and have shared that BOTH feel like they don't want to comment here lest they be attacked or that it's just too toxic to go near. It breaks my heart a little, but that's also the ugly, difficult, and necessary side of an open equal access feedback loop. Lots to think about for future governance tweaking, for sure.

The vast majority of that feedback for years basically has been "salaries are impossible, do the work, get paid for it after, then define more work." Now we're here, and people are rightly concerned— it's becoming obvious it's less about how the pay is defined, and more about the perception that every proposal ever made just gets bigger so more people can sit on their heels (and the proletariat.) What I do with the funds in public and what comes next as I define and execute the exponentially growing pile of tasks to support dapps and "the brand" of Hive matters a lot, and we simply won't get there, back or forwards pay, without people being brutally critical of me and me creating new standards. It absolutely sucks to follow the advice/desires of consensus, actual needs of the chain, and a lot of the less visible tasking and have it actually be shaped by the collective actions of previous proposals into "the face of extraction," but come the next few months and stretching into the extended timeline, it's mine to change.

Just have to do it. Everyone will be watching me and my wallet (which is what I should have been focusing on very performatively early on) but that's why I've created this proposal now.