Yep those eth fees were crazy last year, but, that alone makes a good case for a free-to-use general purpose smart contracts chain.

I also doubt Hive would suffer another exchange attack, but, if it did, I suppose it would require a hard fork to mitigate within the 30 day window for witness voting. While that would work, having a mandatory hard fork as a feature isn't great. As we've seen before, PoS/DPoS works really well - until the day it doesn't. (not fear mongering, it'll probably all be just fine).

I haven't really followed EOS at all but I suppose that would be the next closest thing to koinos - as far as I understand it's split up into varying resources (cpu/ram/network) which isn't a great user experience and doesn't have payer/payee semantics like koinos or delegation like hive. It seems pertinent to be able to launch applications with free accounts and for dApps to be able to allow their users to use them completely for free in order for dApps to go mainstream.