The social aspect is definitely the key part about Hive. I still think the free transactions with RCs is still a decent point but I guess there could be alternatives. Even WAX had that to an extent but they had problems scaling. I wonder if things will hurt us if we have a huge influx of users.
The issues of wax were related to an excessive use of bots. That's the reason why it's not free to create a WAX account anymore.