I don't personally think that's an issue, big stakeholders want the best of hive as they're proportionally paying for a lot of it in a way. We need to see more proposals from trusted people bringing in verifiable proofs that there was an attempt at it at least and where effort and time was spent, if that doesn't get funded or attempted then you could start thinking there's something weird going on, but again I don't see that happening here.
I think it's potentially more the process of it and trust being placed on the wrong people partially to do the work on top of the ideas themselves being outdated/inefficient for a project as small as Hive with its funding range.
I don't want to trust anybody.
I want to see receipts.
I don't think we need any marketing beyond the content created on Hive being well rewarded. Folks searching on topics our creators write about will see posts where the authors got paid by their audience for writing it.
That's all the marketing plan we need.
but we need to end the unrestrained taxation of content creators for any reason but spam, scams, or plagiarism, and particularly the forever flagging that eliminates all rewards a creator is allocated by curators if they have made just one post that was problematic. Flagging that problem post is fine. Flagging that author until they grovel before the Lords of Hive is bass ackwards marketing, because the market for Hive will see such 100% taxation on posts and rightly avoid Hive because of it, because it's unfair to the curators and the creators to have good posts defunded, and taxation is theft, which should be reserved for violations of the NAP like spam, scams, and continued plagiarism - and posting to multiple platforms isn't plagiarism.
DV's are taxes. I'm agin' 'em, except as undertaken to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism.