As far as marketing, that shouldn't be added to the backs of devs and witnesses, it should be a team with actual marketing experience dedicated to that specific task.
Well that sure didn't work with Steemit Inc, did it?
witnesses should be held to a minimum standard
They're the backbone of this blockchain and certainly should be held to a higher standard. Take a glance at similar DPoS/PoS chains with similar concepts to witnesses. The standards are very high. We have proposals for a reason: to get things funded, which brings me to the next part of your reply...
they all have lives, families and jobs outside of here and hive probably isn't their main source of income
Again, they know what they're getting into. And on top of that, it isn't the rate of action that people are frustrated with, it's the complete inaction entirely. They seem completely uninterested with actually listening to what anyone says, let alone having the community actually vote for change. But once again, we have proposals to fund these things. We have money to actually spend on developers that could build things the community requests, but are we doing that? Nope. Is there a reason? None that makes any sense.
It didn't work with steemit because they hired degenerates. Hire a quality firm and you wouldn't get a debacle like that. Bandfield's face takes the credibility out of anything for me.
I understand what you are saying with other chains and all of that plus I agree they don't listen to the community much. I get what you are saying just I'm not a dev so I can't really say what it requires or anything but there is no point constantly being negative about it, when it annoys me enough, I'll do like the rest and vacate I guess. Til then ride the waves? It does make it un-attractive to investors when development is stale and so is the community's slow bleed. We can all agree that we need new blood and witnesses to lead by example.