It kind of amuses me that we've had this great feature set for many years, but we've had to have the rest of the crypto market catch up to us and cause a DEFI boom before we really start using these kind of features.
So yeh, better late than never and I applaud. I am looking forward to having a stable and relatively safe place to park crypto funds with a yield to boot. Next challenge - Attract commerce!
This is true to an extent, certainly in terms of the boom increasing the interest level (meaning "interest" by people here, not what is paid out). But we also have evolved in terms of features. The ability to use the DAO to reverse convert and increase supply didn't exist until it was added, and couldn't have been done until the DAO was created somewhat earlier. Demonstrating that in practice probably increased interest in an actual conversion feature (upcoming). Both of those made paying interest more practical because the effect of boosting demand previously without an upper pegging mechanism generally meant a de-peg. This in turn made the interest feature largely useless.
All of the pieces needed to fall into place which happened over time.
I acknowledge that recent advances have certainly improved things, but there have been times when the HBD (or SBD before it) sagged below the $1 peg and could have been defended with an increased interest rate. This is fairly basic currency defense, much like many nation-states have been doing for decades.
Anyway, I'm not here to piss on your parade. I'm happy to see some common sense now prevailing and sensible development taking the platform forward. Keep it up.