PeakD is definitely far more "feature rich" than a generic cloned Hive front end. Part of LeoFinance's success owes to the fact that they actively developed their own stand-alone identity, right down to building their own front end condenser from scratch, and (if you haven't used it) it looks a bit like PeakD with some added features that are specific to the community's niche, and other stuff left off.
There are definite benefits to having your own custom access point, including being able to set rewards to favor those who post from the community site, AND being able to promote the community to niche users, rather than use the "join us on Hive" shotgun approach.
More important than the front end is constant communication from the people guiding the community... because most people don't think and act for themselves. And if everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to take the initiative... we just end up with a bunch of people squatting in place.
Mostly I just want to see the creative community have a "place" and for it to succeed.
=^..^=