That's great to hear all the work in progress in the background. These are things I have been waiting a long time to see finally coming to fruition! Something else I would like to see is the ability for ads, maybe users can monetize their own content that way if they have an outside audience also encouraging writers to share on other social media resulting in more views and traffic for hive . Most of the content consumers everyone is looking for will never join the platform, they just want to read stuff...easily from their facebook or twitter feed or whatever, like a blog-press of the crypto world type approach. Without those features, I think the platform overall is missing out on potential revenue in several ways by not monetizing indirect viewer traffic to the platform. That would give each user the ability to try and earn on their own instead of being at the mercy of a whale or curation team to come splashing by their posts, could help with moral and user retention, along with appearing inviting to those who already have an established audience elsewhere...who knows.
I choose to see Hive as Hive, a new project going in another direction altogether. In my opinion, when we split, we began brand new, fresh. So to me this is an 8 month old platform/project. I wish more would remember that. The days of steemit don't really count as you mentioned, that model clearly wasn't working and why everyone split.