It is not like the top 20 witnesses and the community have hit the snooze button since the split away from Steem. Hive you see today is a lot different under the hood than Steem and a lot of improvements have been made to make it work more efficiently and quicker too.

Dan was the architect of Steem, but he has not touched Hive or responsible of anything that is built on Hive since the split. It is unfair to give him credit for things he had no business in.

When it comes to curation guilds. There are far more than just 2 big ones. Many of which operate on different frontends and in different tokens tied to HIVE too.

5-10 people? I think it is a lot more combined across all the guilds and groups. @curangel alone has 23+ curators who are actively curating a bunch of posts each every day.