For me there are two things I think are critical and will give Hive the best chance of success.

Native layer 1 smart contracts

I want to see projects like Gods Unchained, Crypto Kitties, and the Next Big Thing™ building on Hive. They all using ETH and in my opinion, ETH is where projects go to die. Look what it did to Gods Unchained, Crypto Kitties, and even KOIN Mining.

Remove reward pool from Hive token

I'm not looking at getting rid of the reward pool or social media, I just want to see it self contained in a smart media contract as a dapp and the rewards based on an SMT. The Hive token would be more of a utility token similar to ETH but without the volatile and high transaction fees.

As it is now, any potential investor has to spend hours daily curating content, spend an hour or so writing a post every day, and finding abuse to downvote to keep their investment in Hive somewhat safe and keeping up with those that do any of those things, if they don't their relative stake drops daily. Dapps shouldn't have to be forced to engage in those activities to maintain their relative stake either.