There are designs to allow accounts to be created without people paying anything for the HP - such as account incubation. This can be done using existing logins for Web2.0 platforms too. This was all planned out when I went to Steemfest in Poland promoting SteemPassport, but the dApp designers of the day all wanted to 'win' and create their solution first - instead of working together. Steemit inc. ignored me and Ned fucked off after 15 minutes anyway as was planning his 'exit journey' from Steem anyway.

Bottom line is that solutions exist which would be best made open source, but currently they aren't available. Imo it makes sense to throw significant resources at this challenge and to manage it professionally right the way through. Having already started this on Steem I am not personally willing to invest more of my own time into repeating it on Hive without having guaranteed rewards for it. So unless that changes, it will be up to the biggest stakeholders to take action and only 3SPK and possibly the Splinterlands team are looking likely to do anything like that.

Resolving the problem of the gap of power between early adopters and new users requires a structure for education and creator support - similar to what Youtube provides but handled more by the grass roots. One challenge we face is that as soon as creators join forces, at present, they are accused by the 'curators' of doing so just to exploit 'their' reward pool.

We need an intelligent culture and not one based on power struggles, fear and control.

So my comment ends in the usual way: It takes patience and goodwill to establish a platform in the long term. Any kind of negative publicity will therefore be looked upon rather disdainfully to the point of being damaging by those who see it that way.

100% yes. This takes skills that developers and even plenty of investors tend to lack and that is part of the problem.