yes, exactly that.
That is the whole idea: stop running HiveFest as its own separate thing and fold it into ChainCulture. One free, open, one-day conference with two tracks, and one of those tracks is HiveFest, the dedicated Hive space. Same Hivers, same talks and workshops, but now sitting inside a room full of people who turned up for something broader. You nailed the framing: "which major communities are here? Hive is, with its own area." That is precisely it.
And that is exactly where the effort and the money go. Organising the ChainCulture day is the thing that pulls people in, from EBC, from Barcelona, from other chains and the maker and art scene. They come for ChainCulture and then bump straight into the Hive track. The reach is the product, and producing that day is the real work. HiveFest on its own does not draw new faces, you saw the difference yourself last year.
A few small Hive-focused bits would hang off it: maybe a tiny hackathon, and a breakfast roundtable the morning after where HiveFest folks dig into actually improving Hive together. But the core is that one ChainCulture day, with Hive unmissable inside it. Networking with new people, like you said, is the whole point.