I appreciate your hard work to improve Hive and create sound value that you have always exerted to my knowledge from the start of your involvement here.

I note that your experience with Hacker News elucidates what appears to be a fundamental mischaracterization of Hive, and why you seem to deprecate the potential of censorship resistance in favor of several economic mechanisms as basal to the success of Hive.

Society, free speech being the underlying interactions thereof, is far more valuable than the financial structure it manifests.  You found the comments on Hacker News the fundamental import of the platform because of this principle.  Societies create economies - not the other way around.

Today, financial interests are subverting every potential mechanism IRL to command society to funnel assets to banksters, and censorship is fundamental to this endeavor.  

If focus of development of Hive remains on finance, Hive will become simply another asset to be corrupted for the aggrandizement of overlords, and we have Steem as an example of how DPoS enables this corruption.  

The real value of Hive is it's censorship resistance which fundamentally enables society to interact via Hive, and this is what underlies it's actual economic value.  On every other platform that enabled likes and dislikes, up and down votes, those votes have not been financially rewarding until Steem introduced that potential.  Nonetheless, society has used that form of social interaction.  This demonstrates that curation has value beyond financial.

However, curation rewards replace the social motivation to curate content with financial motivation, and this financializes curation, controlling rewards distribution.  Upvotes and author rewards enable financial rewards to be decentralized to content creators, but curation rewards do the opposite, as does governance dependent on DPoS alone.

Personal gain may prove a more powerful force withal in the effort to make Hive succeed as a platform that enables society to function.  Focus on financial mechanisms is contrary to the promotion of the other values society creates, and will result in Hive being another asset financialized and owned by banksters eventually.

Finally, the internet itself is fundamental to the success of Hive, and presently remains only available through centralized ISPs to individuals.  Unless Hive can be used by society against centralized control, it will not be able to create society resistant to censorship.  You may find this beyond the scope of blockchains, and you are right.  

Because of these facts I do not presently find tokens, nor fiat, to be robust means of exchange.  I do not treat either as money.  Enabling Hive to first enable social interactions, free speech that cannot be censored, even by ISPs, will imbue Hive with value that cannot be financialized, gamed, and taken by banksters away from the people themselves.

You seem not to have understood this, or to prefer your own financial benefit as of primary importance, so I don't expect you to achieve it.  Hope springs eternal, so I point it out here anyway.  

Whether Hive becomes the suitable vehicle for societal victory over financialization that is presently being used to deploy a global tyranny unprecedented historically or not, I remain confident that society will prevail because the real value it has far outweighs financial mechanisms. Something will enable society to maintain free speech and succeed against the extant forces seeking to reduce humanity to chattel - the financialization of humanity itself.

It's possible that Hive could be that mechanism, but curation rewards will be eliminated, and some kind of mesh network that enables individuals to access Hive and bypass censorship will be necessary for that to happen.

I hope you can build that platform, decide to, and enjoy the best of luck doing so.

Thanks!