Maybe, this kind of gets philosophical,
For me this is more about having a clear mission statement, which is essential for successful marketing. If you say 'Hive is x and it benefits you y without risking z', then you have a sales pitch. If you say 'Hive is open to interpretation and might totally change next week, depending on what the richest people want..' then you have a laughing stock for most people.
Anarchy is great, it is needed - but vehicles like this space are served by focus and some kind of agreed upon direction that is clear. It's not reasonable to expect anyone to feel comfortable investing their time and money into building a presence on a platform if the platform can so dramatically shift that it becomes unrecognisable.
the way you earn investment from TIME is by earning stake and keeping it
ok, but my point is that whether you get reward payouts or not, you have put time into your presence here. if changes occur that result in you being unable to experience what you were sold and what you read 'on the tin' (in the web 3.0 shop), then you are likely going to be pissed and 'leave bad reviews'. It doesn't take much of that to kill a project.
I'm just frustrated that even I, as someone who studies Hive, am seeing such differing 'visions' of what it is from people in key positions, that I feel very pulled from one direction to another just thinking about Hive at this point. This is a big part of why most people won't use Hive at this point as far as I am aware. I strongly understand that the more certainty there is baked into a system like this, the more comfortable people feel using it (provided it is not so unchanging as to become stagnant). The idea of routing author rewards towards development funding as a key 'feature' of the system (via upvotes) seems hacky, unprofessional and ignorant of user psychology/experience. The struggle between 'engineering' and 'marketing' is ongoing - just have one brain hemisphere in one camp and the other in the other. lol.
It's not really what "the richest" want. There are probably people richer than me with smaller stakes and who knows I might be richer than some of the people with bigger stakes.
Nobody cares how rich you are, what matters is how much stake you have, and this matters for smaller stakeholders too. If all of the bigger stakeholders agree on direction, that's usually how it is going to go, but often larger stakeholders don't agree or don't care, and the influence of smaller stakeholders is magnified. This is all very much like any business with shareholders, and not all that strange once you recognize it for what it is.
By 'rich' I meant 'have the ability to access whatever stake is needed to affect change to the blockchain'.
I'm just pointing out that any niggles that exist in potential investors' minds regarding the governance and stake can be minimised by very clear delineation of every part of the system in easy to understand terms. e.g. 'author reward pool is for authors of posts by content creators' and DHF is for development. Even if the numbers are adjusted so that authors gain nothing by the change and the same money is moved into DEV somehow without the upvoting - it would imo result in a better taste in the mouth for many observers. Minimising niggles is important at this point I think because there is so much negative perception of Steem and Hive - often unwarranted, but there's no way to clean it up without being super focused on the small points.
One thing I've suggested is to route all the inflation (except maybe some or all of witness rewards, which are needed for operational security) through DHF. Stakeholders could then vote a desired amount into a better-defined content fund (or multiple funds), to the extent that this is seen as a useful expense for marketing, airdrop, etc. It could also go to subsidize second layer communities/platforms, to the extent they are seen as helping to promote or grow Hive (some of the existing DHF proposals are close to this).
No one seems to see this as a big priority with limited development resources (and I don't disagree necessarily), to the extent it is even agreed with at all as a concept (likely mixed).
I think that could well be a good move, but as you say would really be an experiment that would likely cost quite a bit to code and test. Maybe a layer 2 implementation of this in the layer 2 reward pools might be more manageable. In general I see layer 2 spaces as an opportunity for experimentation and want to see the cost of entry to them lowered as much as possible. If the cost is lowered close to zero then they can literally be test spaces for changes to the user experience of layer 1, among other things.
I expect that in the coming year I will be working on customising more than one layer 2 token, so I'll be exploring the options for expansion/change - at the moment I don't really know what is and isn't possible.