only LeoFiance has built their own which costs tens of thousands of dollars.

It doesn't need to, though, at least not directly or even in fiat. Crypto allows ways for participants in a project to be rewarded without spending USD.

One of the things I am involved with for my day job is the "Headless" movement. De-coupling a website front-end and UI from its CMS to get the speed and responsiveness etc ("Core Web Vitals") benefits. This structure is how I would build a Hive-based site, personally.

Steem’s all time high was a fluke. A perfect storm of events never to likely happen again.

I keep looking at alternatives to Hive and how they are priced out, I do believe Hive could increase by a lot. Any one of these things could 10x the $HIVE price IMO:

• Listed on more/bigger exchanges (eg. Coinbase)
• Influential users actively promoting
• More Defi game launches
• Killer app nobody has thought of
• Big reddit-like community
• Frictionless blockchain commerce

Notice I didn't mention filming a documentary.