I agree it is not Steem but I don't agree that means the entire subjective rewarding pool concept has been transformed into all content and nothing but content

The current authors of the Hive Whitepaper like to sell the idea (which most people never agreed to) that Hive as a mechanism to reward content is wrong and that actually it is a more diverse platform which shouldn't be thought of as a way to reward even content. I find this totally insane, but that's what they have said to me. I didn't even bother going into why that doesn't make sense because the reasons are so obvious and despite one of them making a show of saying he'd do a meeting with me to discuss the relevant details, he just paid lip service in private and never did a meeting.

I don't pretend to know exactly what is going or why because there are too many people involved and I don't have all the information. I am, however, used to creating and marketing large systems which share that same problem and in general the way to deal with it most effectively is to capitalise on 'code is law' and to build in clear and transparent rules which prevent controversy that effects large numbers of people personally and thus helps sustain morale and sentiment. People are too used to being fully financially exploited and enslaved in the offline world to be ready to trust that any project like this simply won't repeat that same pattern. Great care needs to be taken (much more than has been so far) to address this marketing chasm.

Since I am on this topic, I spoke personally to Steemit inc's marketing guy for a while at Steemfest and was shocked at how totally unprepared for the role he was. It's good that we now have a pro marketing company in the US working on Hive, but User Experience goes far beyond what they are doing - it needs to start with the very core code of the blockchain and grow from there.

If they own it, at least in a dominant way, they can do as they like.

Yes and they can totally change Hive into something completely unrelated to it's stated intent - but it makes sense to take action to prevent this if we are to protect the TIME and investments made by 10s of thousands of people who bought into a concept that has specifically designated boundaries.