I would say do what's needed for sustainability for at least the next year or two.

With VSC on the horizon (soft launch around end of march early april) while it'll take a bit to get settled in and get going, it could being about many enhanced options to solve this issue further into the long run.

Since we're working on the scale of years I think we can afford to wait a while on a few issues as you say kick the can down the road and hope for some external factor to actually breath some life into HIVE and/or L2 tokens, while also exploring options in more detail.

It might suck to have a reduced APR but when times get tough you just deal with it.

I'm hoping that VSC in essence simply replaced Hive-Engine, I'd hope everyone sees how great it'll be and perform and migrate to it asap.

Them perhaps.. we'll see tokens actually thrive.. Well the ones that are worth a damn anyways.