"If you haven't noticed, most devs in Hive now believe 'rewards for bloggers' needs to die."

Eh, I think this is a small minority. Especially of elitists who have a big stack of HIVE and don't like seeing their HIVE get distributed to others.

"Khal spoke of synergy on HIVE but then doesn't even practice it."

That's just wrong. We have so many synergies on Hive, just because they're not the synergies you envision doesn't mean they don't exist. LeoFinance is intricately linked with the Hive blockchain, leveraging technology in very specific ways that benefit our community and aim to grow it.

Your idea about 3speak shorts is something I posted about a few weeks ago, calling on Threespeak to potentially do some sort of short-form video storage for us so that we can add a "record button" to Threads and have shorts.

That also being said, working with other projects is much easier said than done. They're building their thing, we're building ours. Together we can have some overlaps but hinging our entire roadmap on another project is an unsound idea.

"Hive just can't attract big money and big userbase with these go-nowhere-for-years projects"

lol. Splinterlands was a go-nowhere-for-years project until it wasn't.

So was Amazon. So was Facebook.

Things are nothing until they aren't.

Splinterlands has a cool model and I love their project (and am quite a large investor in it). That being said, they are far from the end-all-be-all. They have a model that works for them. That model won't work for everyone else.

Broaden your eyes, look to the bigger picture. That's my advice. Sitting around here and complaining about the way things are won't get things accomplished. We need a forward-looking ship rather than an in-fighting crowd of Hive maximalists. That's why Leo does away with all the maximalism bs and focuses on expansion, not contraction.