Very little time core dev time from my team has been spent on curation rewards changes (maybe two weeks) or the apr savings change (this latter was 2-3 days probably). No core dev time has been spent on staking (yet), unless you count the past couple of days when I've had to follow the discussions about it to stay informed about proposed ideas.
There has been a lot of time spent on things like development process improvement (setup of continuous integration system and testing frameworks), code refactoring (mostly in hivemind, but some in hived as well), many bug fixes, optimization work for scaling, and developing modular hivemind technology to ease development of scalable Hive apps. These are actually really important things for future efforts, but it's easy to miss them because they aren't as glamorous or relatable as protocol changes.
Good to know and thank you blocktrades. You're right, much of that is backend and we/I don't see it on our end so it can look stagnate. I have seen new posts coming out weekly or so from you guys and other devs which shines some light on this so thank you for taking the time to do so.
Do you feel at some point core devs will work on front ends?
Such as NFT's, a Marketplace, a swap portal that supports more cryptos/fiat conversion etc?
Or is most of this up to outside devs? I only ask because I would like to see some of this done but if it falls more on outside devs to build on top of Hive instead that's good to know so I can start looking for a team.
Generally, I prefer for other teams to work on UIs, mainly because there's so many types of UIs that can be created to do many different things.
I do have two guys that make occasional contributions to condenser (code base used by hive.blog), since it's an open-source project and several projects rely on it. We use that as a way to test new core features we're adding to the blockchain code that need a UI interface.
On the swap portal side, we develop blocktrades.us, of course. One of our main goals for that now is to add support for cheap Euro bank transfers. This should cut costs a lot for people to exchange between Hive-based currencies and fiat currencies (especially as it will allow them to avoid the high transaction fees associated with a lot of the intermediary currencies like BTC and ETH).