I am going to have some... controversial opinions in this comment, I think:

Things we can improve:

(decentralisation)

A large number of Hive nodes and witnessess are concentrated in a few locations geographically. A large amount of these are with Privex, and there is a heavy European lean to this infrastructure. It is still "difficult" for an average person to press a few buttons and spin up a new node in a new location. I've tried so many times over the years, and always get discouraged at the lack of support when questions are asked, outdated documentation, and the complexity of the software environment required. So I suppose that's why we have not many nodes running in people's bedrooms.

(autovoters)

Too many still use auto voters, and blindly upvote people they like, complaining that there's no content. I would allege that not enough people are able to use their index finger to scroll through created where you can find content from everyone, in every community. What I don't like is that I can't mute things like all actifit posts from there, or communities that I will never have an interest in - eg, if there's a community about cooking shawarma skewers while skateboarding and somehow playing soccer at the same time - that would be impressive, but not something I'd be interested in.

(loss)

I will write more about this in my "9 years of hive / steem" post that will be coming up in a few weeks, but I have lost so many people from the early days. They've either gone dark, or seemingly vanished from the Internet. I genuinely miss some of these people, and really wish they, and their content could come back.

(people not using downvotes enough)
There's some absolutely trash content that does need to be discouraged. I know that not every user has been around to understand the mechanisms of HIVE and the higher level of quality that we tend to expect of posts, but when I do (and I DO) scroll through created, there's so many people using a splinterlands tag on something unrelated to splinterlands, in an attempt to get autovotes from bots like splinterboost and others. And they do. They shouldn't. Those rewards should be returned to the pool via downvotes, and the perception of those downvotes shouldn't be a personal attack, but instead seen as an act of "altruism" - ie, this downvote rewards EVERYONE else a tiny bit.

(zing / splinterlands / insertgame name art)

It feels like a lot of these art posts are created to farm rewards. I would rather see artists create their own, original work, instead of fan art for already existing things, or imaginations of things that are only described in text. A lot of the time, for generic characters or themes, I think to myself - if this person wanted to create a piece of art with a nymph character who is a healer - great, do that, but don't put a label of a popular community or game on it - create something original and that original thing should be valued more.

(people actually reading content)

The number of comments that I read below people's posts indicate that a great deal don't read the entire post, or if they do, they don't absorb it. Horrifying, when a lot of posts are so short, and there's not much to absorb anyway.

Things I like:

(the content)

There's so much lovely content on HIVE. So many genuinely intelligent, creative people.

(the engagement - when it is genuine)

When you create something and people genuinely engage, that's magic. Particularly, when that writing was done for none other than yourself. Still, I feel like discoverability needs to be better.

(there's nowhere to hide)

Edit history is always there. Vote history is always there. You can literally see a chain of events.

I could probably go on, but no one will read this anyway. :)