The complete avoidance of something which has long been acknowledged as a real problem, the ridiculous length of the power down, seems to have had a pretty good effect of driving a lot of people out of the platform altogether.

You can tell this by the results of looking at the content diversity on the platform as a whole.

"Baby steps" suffice for babies, but we are talking about babies here. Were talking about a deep, bone deep, design idea that works to the detriment of the market as a whole and the token in specific.

Going from "we'll decide when you can have your property" to "here's 1/13 of your property and will decide when you can have the rest," isn't a baby step. It's no step.

The problem is much more elemental and much more rooted in the base philosophy thing can be addressed with just moving around when the first payoff of trying to get your property under your control is.

At a certain point, you have to accept that the underlying design for a game that's not working is broken and move on to something else. A whole lot of people have made that decision over the last several years about Hive and the power down mechanic is a good chunk of that reason.