Again, community comes first. You want to be here, you abide by the rules of the community. You want to be completely free to say whatever comes to your head, you can still say it here but if it goes against community opinion,

First you should be clear about which type of community you are referring to here. There are the indviual communities on Hive and then there is the unwrittten, unspoken social structure community that everybody tries to cater too for their blessings and votes. The latter is the one I am talking about.

claiming to also make money out of the community budget while flouting community consensus is ... a bit rich!

This is a mojor point that I cant very eloquently convey with words. Everything on Hive is tied to some type of reward. Not every action needs or even should have a monetary value tied to it. You can appreciate a persons effort on a post without agreeing with it. The only mechanism we have to counter act this is to use the variable vote weight. You should be able to "like" a person's post without it effecting someone else's value that they put on the same post.
As an example John Doe does a post and 10 people give it upvotes and one person who has more HP than the 10 before doesnt like it they down vote it an cancels out the value the other 10 people got out of the post. That is not a fair thing to the creator of the post or to the people who voted on it. 1 person's perception of value on a creators work should not cancel out someone elses. This is a major thing for new users to understand and is a big reason of why they leave so fast and no one wants to hear it or even address it. It's just mentioned to new users now and then in a non challant way. "Make sure your post aligns with the community". They think about the community they are posting in. But we are actually saying is "make sure you tow the line."

In my opinion the direction of change should be "non monetary". Hive should rather work on social aspects: values and principles, mission and vision, and one or two leading figures.

Absolutely! Hive was built for long form blogging but it's the social media aspect thats actually attracting and retaining users. But being built for long form blogging is not a one size fits all situation. So it does need an overhaul at the core to fit social media. We cant just slap a Ferrari body on top of Yugo and think that it will will then the race. You gotta change the engine and drive train too.

For most of the social media aspects I think most but not all can be addressed through the front ends themselves. Brllant case in point is Liketu. Go to thei site and not login. Take a look at what you see. You see a social media site that appeals to the younger generations. You can see the content users are posting. You can browse through categories and keywords. All with no references to Hive, blockchain, NFT's or any other crytpocurrency. Only when you sign up do you see those things. Thats the right way to show and attract the world. The front ends are the key to getting people on board. It's the fundamentals that we have to discuss to keep them here.