Hey mate. Long time!
I suspect that in time, the rewards pool will be increasingly closed off to both stabilise the infrastructure level and reward holders/investors as key parts of the network, with much of the reward value getting pushed to second-layer tokens. I also think that the inflation rate might even be changed in the future, so the 1% a year will happen sooner than 2035, but this is all conjecture.
At the moment though, I do think it is possible to get rewarded on Hive, but it isn't just through Hive itself. I think Leo is a good example of this, where quite a few took the opportunity to build in a way they couldn't on Hive alone. Splinterlands is another example of this.
Most of the Hive on exchange is still from the original mine as that accounts for over half the current supply. But, has it changed hands?
Hey man! Wish you are doing good!
I have not been update how this works, but I suspect they are still using the hive blockchain. If so they will still need to invest in hive tokens to be able to do transactions. And it is a pity if those hive tokens themselves do not hold value. If a subtoken is more valuable than the hive token itself, there would be different ecosystems, which will be similar to ethereum, only in the case of ethereum, ETH would become more valuable.
The Hive blockchain has always been a general blockchain that allows for the building of secondary tokens. This means that the entire Hive ecosystem can support a huge amount of value through seperate experiences. In this way, it is similar to eth. However, as you can see with eth, it was unable to scale (might be different with London) and struggled to handle even low levels of volume. I don't know why anyone would build high transaction apps on eth considering the cost of transactions, even if it is a very low cost.
The cost of transactions on Hive is in Resource Credits, which are inky generated through Hive Power. This means thay as the transactions increase, RCs will have a value too and to have them, apps or users will need HP.
Edit:
Splinterlands currently has a market cap well over 100M.