Hi @acidyo, I'm a bit "late to market" on this post, but I'll still share a few rambling thoughts.
On the "trading" front... having watched this for almost as long as you have, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Hive's daily volume is done by people who sit in front of a chart and do technical analysis and may hold hundreds of thousands of Hive on an exchange, but they don't actually even have a Hive account... and exist entirely outside the Hive ecosystem. Think of the numerous times when traders on Upbit send Hive spiking and subsequently spiraling... and $300 million suddenly trades in 24 hours. I really don't think it has anything to do with Hive; as you suggested, probably just bots. We can talk about "the percentage of Hive held on exchanges" till we're blue in the face, but it's unlikely to ever change... we might as well count it as "off the table."
"Value" is a slippery beast. Consider why a token with virtually no use cases on a blockchain with barely any use cases and very little activity is worth 10x what Hive is and more likely to increase in value, from a strictly factual perspective? It's all perception. We humans are very fickle. Even if we don't *admit" it, instant riches on speculation fascinates us far more than growing rich slowly through hard work. As I have said/written before, Hive is becoming more and more like a utility token, which is — sadly or not — far less "sexy" than something wildly speculative.
For me, value comes from focusing on the actual work part.
I'm a writer/blogger. That's what I do; what I've been doing for 25 years. I create content; sometimes in the form of articles; sometimes "commentary." Content that I find interesting has value, to me. And likely to my peers/colleagues. I don't have a "general" following on Facebook or twitter, or elsewhere. I have a "narrow niche" following. There's a difference.
Which introduces an angle to your conversation about "value" that doesn't often get touched on. Since becoming part of this community, I have become a far more "general" content creator.
Some years back (when PeakD first added user accessible tracking metrics) , I wrote some "targeted" posts specific to my offsite following, and promoted them to a couple of my Facebook groups and pages (about 30,000 sets of eyeballs) and the articles were at least opened several 100 times. But these were non-Hive eyeballs, so there were few comments and upvotes, and the content was actually "not interesting" to the broader audience that is Hive.
So... where does that fit, on the "value" scale? We're left with the question "value, but to WHO?"
My particular niche (narrow band of psychology) doesn't preclude my being able to recognize that gaming can add value to Hive, or video (3Speak) can add value to Hive, or music can add value to Hive, or DeFi can add value to Hive... those things just don't happen to fit inside my wheelhouse.
Leading to...
Hive is at the point of "growing up." Just like few people say "you should be on the Internet" or maybe "You should be on Facebook" anymore, "being on HIVE" is increasingly going to lose traction in favor of individual things you can DO on Hive. I think Splinterlands was perhaps the first step in that direction; the game "existed" as itself, with Hive simply being the framework.
Whereas I admire the current LeoFinance initiative, and it may still work well, we're probably closing on the end of just going after "users," and should instead be going after niches.
Sorry about the long-ass dissertation... but I think you're bringing up important considerations, here.