It will be interesting to see how HIVE Power will be used if there was a liquid form of it.

Maybe. There are some risks of centralization on the L1 - i.e. the witnesses of VSC where HIVE would be staked to receive the sHIVE would become quite powerful on L1 Hive, depending on the amount of HIVE being staked and the number of VSC witnesses participating. Their collateral would need to be significant too, since they need 2x the collateral of the amount they are allowed to process (I suppose that includes staking too).

splinterlands is doing a great job with the way they are voting.

You mean their proposals? They at least seem to be moving, DHF seems mostly frozen.