The biggest problem right now limiting Hive from being a more widely used and accepted place to build dApps is lack of smart contracts. As many of us know, you can build some great applications on Hive and it's so easy to build them as well. However, for some use-cases, it would be nice if developers could publish smart contracts without the need to run their own API's and manage resource credits.
And I think one of the biggest differentiators that could make Hive standout is allowing contracts to be written using Javascript. The software behind Hive Engine supports writing contracts using Javascript, but it only works for the main Hive Engine node itself, which means you cannot do transfers or anything involving token balances.
We already have the developer ease-of-use, let's reduce the barrier to entry even more. Every other major blockchain has smart contracts, but they're all custom languages like Solidity which don't necessarily map 1:1 to developers who already know languages like Javascript.
I mostly disagree, as I see little need for smart contracts as opposed to 2nd layer apps for this. However, there are some advantages for smart contracts, and I'll discuss those in my next post on this subject.
I see your point about smart contracts not requiring that there be additional API servers to support the 2nd level apps, but I see this as doing no one any real favors.
This forces 1st layer nodes to support apps that they shouldn't be forced to support and it forces those apps to be supported in a less secure and less performant way. It also destroys scalability, since all the apps have to fit into a "one size fits all" node architecture. And don't even get me started on the increased difficulties of paralellizing the workload of the smart contracts.
And it's not like the smart contract developers really get a free ride either: the blockchain has to somehow pass on those extra costs to the smart contract's developor or users, or else the whole platform will just be taken down when smart contracts abuse those scarce resources. While the smart contractor developer doesn't necessarily pay those costs (depending on the smart contract platform), their users do, and this can have real impacts on the adoption rate for the developer's smart contract.