I definitely see your point even better now. KE is definitely just one metric, it could be useful to make a preliminary judgement, but definitely there are more things to consider. Even extremely extractive users could be bringing value to Hive if their content is unique and attracting new eyeballs here.

For myself, I don't really chase the KE, but I do try to build up my HP :) After around a year of taking Hive seriously I made it into top 1,000 HP holders at # 832 :)