I had no idea you were involved with EOS Hackathons. I have complaining about the exact things you mentioned. There have been many hard working developers who never got funding. @kencode and @risingstar are two examples I can think on top of my head. The idea of funding project with DAO delegations came after trying to think of a way to get the Whales to fund more development.

@dalz has a lot of stats on blockchain activity posted. These are the active users for @peakd

crazy to think about in a world where so much stuff is getting censored on traditional centralized social media.

I have noticed that people tend to be around where other people are. If we need to make HIVE blow up, we will have to onboard users with very little friends and social media activity (such as myself) or onboard an entire community at once. The other alternative is games.