I appreciate your frankness.
I think it's safe to say that there's always a few different ways to reach the same goal. As long it's done honestly.
Regarding that 100x difference.. I need to stress out again that it's only happening since a couple of months or so. All the years behind have been a transparent slow grind. And it's happening mainly because of the lack of content in Hive, otherwise we would still be the niche unnoticed community we so much like to be.
We never had any user telling us that they though we were profiting on them. The feedback has always been quite positive. But I can understand your point.
I might tweak things a bit in the near future.
Cheers.