Hive is doing just fine. We are still around, 7 years later. That in itself is an accomplishment for a blockchain. We keep improving, slowly but surely. If we grew quickly, there is the risk the platform would break. Slow growth is best.
we don't have that many non-content-creating users that consume only.
I doubt that's true. We don't see the non-content-creating users here because they are unable to comment without making an account and the stats for this site are not readily available or easy to parse given all the frontends involved, but I can almost guarantee you it is a non-zero number. Hive ranks very high in SEO. Many times if you search for something you know is on Hive, the Hive post you are thinking of will be at the top of Google. There is no way that this isn't leading to a lot of incoming traffic.
That said, if you want to talk problems, Hive's problem here is we have no way to convert casual traffic into fans. We have no subscription function. No RSS, no "email me for updates", no newsletter, none of the things that other blogging platforms like Wordpress have. Not to mention, the only way to leave a comment is to make an account, and Hive accounts are so incredibly hard to make for normal people that they give up. It's not worth it for just a comment. Hive will never grow massively until we figure out an easier way to sign up for accounts that doesn't scare off people with dozens of keys. Adding a way for people without accounts to interact would help growth.
3speak sucks, simply put. It has sucked from the beginning. It is a horrible experience. If we want to compete against YouTube, 3speak is not the one to do it. Some more people should tackle video on Hive, just like Leo and Ecency are tackling small-form (Twitter) content.
Seeing it the same way.
Having an easy way to just comment as a guest, to leave a "like" without earning, why not?
Also, I would like to see the "eyes" in numbers on the single blog posts on hive frontend (in the very beginning this was a function but then it disappeared).