and few changes require hardforks, so we'll likely be delivering incremental improvements to the stack at a fairly fast rate
I was actually wondering recently about hardforks and the lack of them. I thought this might be the case. Much better for rapid instrumental releases
Yes, another of our main goals has been to make it easy to make useful changes to Hive without needing to change the core code much.
The analogy I like to use is an operating system and software that runs on it. Ideally you don't want the operating system having to change too often, because every time there is a change, there is a chance for new errors to get introduced and such low level errors can take down the entire system. So new functionality is better added via programs instead of via operating system updates.