I also tend to avoid giving significant votes to people who are just powering down everything.
And that is what I mean by it being a failure, most rewards that get distributed is just gets sold out and we end-up with our current value when you combine that with insane DHF spending.
As far as the reward pool and rewarding content with it, I mean this is still the fundamental use case for hive. I don't think you can do away with it, at least not now. That isn't to say it can't be improved.
And that is why we don't get rid of it immediately but gradually, as the ad network revenue picks the slack.
As far as ad revenue, I think that has been experimented with by a couple of front ends. My understanding is that It didn't make enough money to be worthwhile.
I think that was because it wasn't a blockchain level ad network, it was fragmented. With a blockchain level ad network, we can leverage all frontends for the ads. And iirc those ads were basically opt-in.
I am not claiming these are foolproof solutions of course, there could be better ways.