Hive, and before it Steem, still suffers from one crucial problem: lack of marketing. Steem squandered millions of dollars on "running servers" and development, it remained in the "beta" stage for years; who would want to adopt a platform in perpetual testing? Not very smart marketing-wise. Hive is no better, sure we had a major improvement in the code that significantly allowed system operators and witnesses to cut down on resources requirements and costs (i.e. API nodes going from the super expensive 512GB RAM servers to only 20-64GB), but despite the technical improvement there's little investment in marketing. Therefore Hive remains a niche in a highly competitive and emerging free speech space. Hive doesn't need more devs, it needs more professional salesmen.