Damn this is so spot on with how I feel.
So the idea of doing away with the rewards pool has resurfaced. For me, it's a very simple thing - and I say that with almost 25 years experience with content sites that reward user-authors - without the rewards pool Hive is just a hard-to-use and complicated blog site with very little effective external traffic. Even though I don't use it much anymore, my typical Blogger post still gets between 300 to 500 page views in the first 30 days. Writers are fickle, and often starving. Take away the rewards pool and it'll just be "back to Google Adsense."
Layer two for rewards is a nice idea but no community yet seems to have figured out a tokenomics and feature/benefits mix to keep their token worth more than fractions of a cent.
Except I am really disappointed.