Thanks for this update @roadscape. I believe that Hivemind will pave the way for Steemit to become a major community platform. With the right features, Steemit communities could eventually not only replace Reddit, but even become a replacement for Facebook groups (which are the only reason that I still have a Facebook account!).
We at @travelfeed are desperately awaiting these features as they will make our curation job so much easier as well as help to grow the travel community on Steemit! I would love to see some features that would make steemit.chat/discord/skype groups like our Steemit Travellers Discord obsolete and bring many of the features that Discord groups are currently used for to the Steem Blockchain (e.g. a community calender for organising meetups and community posts managed by multiple mods e.g. for collecting contests relevant to the community), eventually even an integrated community chat (maybe outside the blockchain since I am not sure how a chat could work on a Blockchain with 3 seconds between blocks).
Is there any ETA for Hivemind 1.5 (I know you said in an earlier post that you won't set dates, but roughly maybe?)? We are thinking about developing a steem-python bot for @travelfeed to make our curation work easier, but Hivemind would make most if not all of it obsolete, so there is no point in putting a lot of time into developing a bot if Hivemind will be available soon!
Yes, I'm excited for hivemind to strengthen the community's ability to organize. I hope it will make old tools obsolete so devs can focus on building even more powerful ones. I can say we'll provide another update when 1.0 is ready for testers (soon as we finish the initial test) with an outlook for 1.5.