Sounds like continuous scope increase. :)
Would it make sense to leave out anything non-essential in Hivemind for after the initial release? My understanding is that non-critical bugs, optimizations and such can be addressed at any point in time - potentially after the hardfork, as continuous iterative improvements (something which hasn't been feasible to do for the blockchain code).
I am concerned that as these optimizations are being made, we are losing out greatly by not spending that time on adding Hivemind features which could make a tremendous difference for the platform. Here are some examples of such community-building features, but I'm sure ideas can be sourced from existing communities to see what will help them grow and offer incredible value to people currently using other platforms.
There's been no scope increase. It's more discovery of bugs in current implementation.