So many great points here I am going to add on but first:

I agree with you that is not what it promises to be. The reality is that Hive is a dystopia with communistic flairs instead of a decentralized land with no censorship. To be honest, when I was writing the post, the comparisons with communism just came through my mind as I was visualizing what I actually was writing down. Those extreme examples I gave (which have offended a few) never crossed my mind before I wrote my post and saw Hive in a different light.

Little did I know how much lip service is paid to those values.
It's very understandable that everybody at the start thought hive was this decentralized and no censorship land, all was still new. We were innovating. But all dystopia starts out looking like utopias or with utopian ideas. Living long enough in a dystopia some citizens will see for what it is and some not.

For example, I've had the debate about censorship and apparently, hiding posts is not censorship because you can find them if you look or use A-another Dapp. Sounds like censorship to me. Isn't that what happens in wartime? They block foreign radio and news outlets?

Exactly, it is censorship. When we look at the blockchain level, there are so many risks for the blockchain to be censored, there are only 21 witnesses, yes "voted" by the people. But many of the % of people are truly voting? And how long are these witnesses in power? In the 4.5 years I have been away the witness list seems to be unchanged, maybe 1 or 2. Power is centralized in a small group. Worse is this small group can implement protocol altering changes with like only 3/4 of them.

There's no list of Do's, and Dont's nobody tells you that EVERY image you use that's not yours requires a source link or that voting for your mother, brother, aunt, and cousins will be classed as "Vote Farming", so best not to encourage your family to join and then just to add insult to injury lodging an appeal is like wading through a French Foreign Legion assault course.

This is the worst of the Hive blockchain. Outside Hive blockchains have implemented "Can't do Evil" in their base design. In Hive we rely on social factors who say to you: "Don't do Evil". If a family members can vote on each other they will do so. Ethical or not, the design of Hive allows them to do so. We have to trust people to not do evil, and we all know we can't trust people. The most ethical thing for blockchains is to make the design in such a way that people can't do evil. There will also be bad actors that who fuck everyone over. People in Hive shout: "Community, community, community!!!". "We trust in our community! We have the best community! The power of hive is the community!" or something along those lines. This was a (community) marketing or I dare to even say propaganda, which have misled people to actually think about how to truly create a decentralized environment without censorship. And the answer is: it's a combination of both community and code (to create the right incentives). And most of the people are blind to the latter. There are a lot of smart people that understand this, but they either have been cast away for putting this subject into light, and thus moved to other blockchains where they are heard. Or they simply don't care to contribute because there is no environment nor incentives in place for them. Hive has had a massive brain drain.

Who decides what's Good Content because it's not the amount of votes/rewards it gets, especially when there's a Leveling of rewards activity going on.

Very good point. It was a social experiment to see if good content could be discovered this way. Clearly the experiment failed. Now Hive is trying to become an applications platform, and they are trying to build this upon a blockchain which was designed for blogging. And even worse their more successful DPOS chain brother, as you all might know EOS, have failed to be an enterprise applications platform. And there are up to date no successful DPOS applications blockchains in the top 20 market cap.

And Hivers think they can make it work. Tall ask if you ask me.