Maybe, this kind of gets philosophical,

For me this is more about having a clear mission statement, which is essential for successful marketing. If you say 'Hive is x and it benefits you y without risking z', then you have a sales pitch. If you say 'Hive is open to interpretation and might totally change next week, depending on what the richest people want..' then you have a laughing stock for most people.

Anarchy is great, it is needed - but vehicles like this space are served by focus and some kind of agreed upon direction that is clear. It's not reasonable to expect anyone to feel comfortable investing their time and money into building a presence on a platform if the platform can so dramatically shift that it becomes unrecognisable.

the way you earn investment from TIME is by earning stake and keeping it

ok, but my point is that whether you get reward payouts or not, you have put time into your presence here. if changes occur that result in you being unable to experience what you were sold and what you read 'on the tin' (in the web 3.0 shop), then you are likely going to be pissed and 'leave bad reviews'. It doesn't take much of that to kill a project.

I'm just frustrated that even I, as someone who studies Hive, am seeing such differing 'visions' of what it is from people in key positions, that I feel very pulled from one direction to another just thinking about Hive at this point. This is a big part of why most people won't use Hive at this point as far as I am aware. I strongly understand that the more certainty there is baked into a system like this, the more comfortable people feel using it (provided it is not so unchanging as to become stagnant). The idea of routing author rewards towards development funding as a key 'feature' of the system (via upvotes) seems hacky, unprofessional and ignorant of user psychology/experience. The struggle between 'engineering' and 'marketing' is ongoing - just have one brain hemisphere in one camp and the other in the other. lol.