Sorry for the late comment, haven't had good chances to get to commenting!
One of the things that's lacking today is definitely genuine people sadly. I think it's a product of the Kardashian style shit that people see on TV all the time or see in the media etc. where they are just shitty people, don't contribute anything to society and are just overall fucking lame. I wonder if it was always this quantity of those types of people or if it has increased because of the access to people across the entire world the way we have it right now.
I think with Hive, Task had put it well the other day. With Hive and the future of Hive, do we really want millions of people on here? We all seem to wonder what "mass adoption" will look like. The thing is places like China have billions of people in it but the quality of living in China is atrocious. Whereas in a place like Monaco, the standard of living is much higher. Do we hope that we gain 50-100k more people and kind of cap it there, in the sea of billions of people across the world and crypto space? I found that quite an interesting thought experiment and not sure where I stand on that exactly.
As well, with a billion people on Hive, the price is likely going to be in the toilet with constant downward pressure on it. Price doesn't always mean anything but it's a good metric for the overall success of a blockchain IMO. If the price is in the toilet, it's not as appealing as if it were holding steady in a mid to high range price. It won't get to the status of like Bitcoin but I think it would be a pretty comfortable spot to be top 100 on Coin Gecko.
It's a bit of a round-about way to say that there will always be people looking to mooch and it's hard because we want to see how things develop and want it to grow. However look at Splinterlands. It's gone parabolic compared to where it was 1.5 years ago and we have thousands of bots extracting tens of thousands of dollars per week in rewards. Definitely some give and take!