Well I agree, but in the end work on hivemind still falls upon the "core dev" umbrella as it's closely tied to hived, I mean front ends (as I'm sure you're aware :p) are already very busy working on things like improving user experience etc. In the end I think hivemind/communities should be treated as a backend, where the front end teams ask for features and the back end team (core dev) work on them to expose the apis.

Ultimately I think it's a worthy tradeoff in terms of "time spent vs new features" for me as I can quickly churn out a lot of new things for the front ends who can then focus on implementing them in their respective front ends instead of spending time implementing them in hivemind.
There's also the fact that nobody is really stepping up to work on communities so someone has to do it as one point.