I've written Solidity code before some number of years ago and didn't find it all that hard. The key is to keep things short and simple, and to do thorough testing on a testnet before deploying for real. Always do a fuzzing test on your code to make sure there's no unexpected behaviour when fed unexpected or invalid input.
Smart contracts are the one feature I wish Hive had on-chain, when used right they're an extremely powerful tool for trustless decentralisation. Sure their biggest use has been tokens, but they're general purpose and can be used for far more than that.
Rising transaction fees on Ethereum ended up driving me away from developing on it, it became unfeasible for any of my ideas to be implemented in a user friendly manner.
Right now I consider Monero to be the best cryptocurrency, it's got the best overall technical approach to things. I even wrote a post about Monero. I'd say Hive is second place to Monero, and only because it doesn't feature any privacy features for transactions like Monero does.
Something that could combine the features of Monero, Hive, and Ethereum would be the ultimate blockchain platform.
Have you looked at theta?
It is written in solidity, too.
I don't code, so any feedback will help.