I don't know enough to say what the solution is but I agree that something needs to be done to bring some life back to the Hive token itself. The tribes and their separate tokens is excellent, but unless Hive climbs in price like ETH, it implies that the entire design of the token is flawed somewhat.
Tokenized social media blogging is such a brilliant concept, and works - in theory - as we have already seen. It's just the Hive price that isn't reciprocating. I presume having an unlimited liquidity pool of Hive tokens is too inflationary. Like the USD money printing perhaps?