What else do we need to do to get closer to Patreon type feature set?

I think everything is there now (after hf25 I mean), we just need to build an app that leverages all of the core features. Paywall can be implemented as an L2 or even in a centralized manner in the first place.

Basically if we look at what patreon does: https://www.patreon.com/product/lite

hosted page where you can write updates etc => done that's hive
a wallet to get money => done
monthly subscriptions => recurrent payments
collect emails etc => has to be centralized for privacy concerns but it's not that bad imo
analytics => can be done relatively easily
paywalled content => can be done in a centralized or l2 way

Also how would you go about approaching encryption for pay wall type content?

That's a good question hmmm I think I would first make a centralized app, I think it's not that important to make it decentralized and have paywalled post shareable over multiple front ends, it's even better because it would drive traffic to your website which has a front end dedicated to that type of content, so the users will have a better experience. And it allows you to validate market need and market it first and then build a more complex version if needed. I would just encrypt the post and push them to the chain in their encrypted state, and then the front end would decrypt it when displaying it to users if they have a recurrent transfer active.

Then if (and only if!) there is a need for multiple dapps to interact with the same paywalled content, it gets more complicated but you could imagine a way for front end to share the keys it doesn't have to be trustless, there will only be a limited amount of actors making front ends anyways. And if this takes off, then we could spend the time figuring out the cryptography to make it native meaning there is no need for centralized key sharing. I'm not a cryptographer
so I am not sure it's even possible but it would definitely be worthwhile to research.

What are you favorite types of non hive development posts to find on here?

Hmmmmmm, I don't read a ton of non-development posts on hive haha, but lately I've enjoyed the work of @olebulls or for a more og, @fredrikaa's posts