You touch on a lot of issues here, and you've put them out in a way that impels me to answer you.

I, like yourself was a big Steemit fan, and benefitted greatly from the site. I too saw issues that I thought would get fixed eventually as they ironed out this brand new concept. However I saw a reluctance from Steemit Inc to invest the millions they were making to market the site and get people using us while we were on a hot streak and being mentioned in various mainstream media titles. Unfortunately this has not changed, and in fact this is less likely to happen for one major reason, there is now a hell of a lot less organisation.

We all beat the drum of decentralisation, but the plain simple fact of the matter is, you cannot have true direction without some sort of centralised organisation making decisions. Let's not forget that Communities actually started out on Steemit. As piss-poor as Ned was at organising, he still managed some organisation.

The next problem is that the site is run by programmers and not savvy business people, this means that they get excited about things that normal users don't care about. This is easily confirmed by looking at any random announcement by the Hive team, it's full of technical jargon that only other developers understand or care about. You will see this by reading the comments, there are so many that basically say "I don't understand this, but I guess if you're excited about it, it must be good"

Next we have to look to good old fashioned economics as to why Hive isn't worth more. Possibly the oldest rule of an economic system is you have to have supply and demand. If you have an infinite supply of something for which there is a limited demand, the price for that thing will be low. The Hive elephant in the room is that this site creates millions of Hive every single day, over a billion per year, to be honest it's remarkable Hive is worth anything at all.

Then if we look at it from a creator's point of view, as you yourself opined, unless you have direct Whale assistance, or you yourself are a Whale, then earning a living wage from Hive is impossible. Even if you are in that exalted position, making a living is still pretty difficult as the 7 day payout model hampers you from making like you would on other platforms like Youtube.

If you make a video on Youtube, you could potentially earn from that video in 5 years time, on Hive you could have an article viewed by a million people, but if only fifty Hive users click on it, you'll earn a few bucks. Plus of course any advertising on Hive doesn't go to the creator.

Will we ever see a $5 Hive? Maybe if millions of people start using Hive, but that won't happen because the only way to find out about Hive at the moment, is to have someone who already uses it, telling you about it. Maybe you'll click an article link, but in that scenario a user is more interested in the content of the link than the platform it has shared to. For instance I have clicked a story this morning about Facebook blocking Australian users. I clicked it from Twitter, and whilst I could tell you the contents of the article, I have absolutely no idea what platform it was on.

For me Hive is just a place to keep practicing my writing (not that I have done that lately) and a good place to find out about what's going on in the world of crypto.

I hope this article gets more than the current $1.00 it's on, it deserves it!

Cg