Thank you for the detailed suggestion!
I totally agree about the first missions not really being worth it but I'd actually already added a longer mission before you posted this! :-)
In relation to using ATOM in the game you can already do this as I have added a number of cards on the market for ATOM. We moved the ATOM token from Steem to Hive a few weeks ago so withdrawals from AtomCollectorRecords.com now goto Hive Engine.
Hopefully others will start to list their cards for sale for ATOM in the future too.