Your statement is quite accurate although many here in this space have a hard time acknowledging it.
"After running my hive tests I've come to the conclusion (and I'm 100% correct) that nobody outside of Hive really knows about hive. It doesn't matter that it is an awesome blockchain. Nobody has heard of us and it is very difficult to onboard for and get started."
The platform is confusing and cluttered with all the frontends giving access to the same thing. The way upvoting and reward distribution works isn't self-explanatory; one has to dive into several articles to get a basic comprehension on how things work. In order to onboard peeps from the FAAMG world, things need to become more user-friendly. A confused mind never buys! This totally applies to the Hive blockchain.
PS. Thanks for raising the 'onboarding process' question.