I applaud your belief and commitment.

But...

LEO is currently failing to even function (504 ERROR) with the small growth it's receiving through recent Z initiative.

HOW is that a 50-100 million ecosystem?

Also let's take a deeper dive:

Apparently the HIVE nodes aren't keeping up. So LEO needs to launch it's own node or spread the load across nodes.

This reveals that either:

LEO has a lot of work to do in order to strengthen it's backend. And should have done so already if it planned for growth.

Or...

HIVE nodes are themselves not able to handle any type of heavy activity beyond custom JSONs. Which, in the last fork was made more expensive by core code developers.

So in reality...
If LEO wants to grow. It needs to put big capital into it's own backend or risk outages at the mercy of other HIVE nodes.

Furthermore, LEO has clear competition from d.buzz and it would seem that if their proposal gets funded, those that back d.buzz would likely see LEO as opposition.

LEO team needs to realize that their growth dependent on these variables is a very unstable future.

Like you say in your post. A thing so good shouldn't need shilling. So then maybe the thing is yet to be that good.