Secondarily, there are limitations to hive economics and social norms that make it impossible to earn enough votes to live on just from Hive SBI. As a curation service that provides accounts with ongoing support (permanently support somebody without ever having to rebalance all your voting rules!) it has been a fantastic success.I originally envisioned @steembasicincome as an experiment to see whether it's possible to crowdsource a sustainable universal basic income. In that context, I consider the experiment a failure. The main reason, as you stated- it's not a basic income because it requires a minimum level of effort from the account owner to receive their votes (create a quality post).
You see the transition in branding around the time of the Hive fork, although we kept the original accounts. Hive SBI is not actually an acronym for Hive Steem Basic Income as one would imagine, but an acronym for Hive Stake Based Income (less aspirational, more accurate, totally non-obvious).
Indeed, as far as being a basic income source without having to put in effort - this would not function as such. However, the amount of effort required to benefit from it is rather minimal for the vast majority of people. I consider all of the people who write content on unpaid forms of social media, and think that this does end up functioning as a basic income source for activities they would be doing regardless.
Indeed, it is not yet sufficient to provide a livable income for people who live in 1st world countries, but it can indeed be a great source for those in 3rd world countries, plus the program is going to continue to grow. Who knows just how large it's going to be, say, 10 years from now?