Actually, now that Hive is pretty coded out the users are definitely are the most important people in the room and that means those creating, rather than simply sharing(there's a huge difference) and those engaging, which is the number one most important aspect of any social media platform. Hive is not social and until that changes the numbers will dwindle and new comers will never stay. Creators need attention, but also need to create content worthy of attention, which isn't happening, but if they are and there's no audience...then why stay? Hive needs an active audience and that's missing and the content is more personal than it is for the masses, so the audience leaves... So, who are the two that should be one most important userbase on Hive?
Everything you've said above has been said over and over throughout the years and it's never made a difference. Who can be the difference and move that change along? The big curators... They drive what's acceptable as content and determine what trends with their huge votes. If they demand more and use that influence to put on more challenges and contests, not only do they spread the Hive around better, but they can increase quality content and even engagement by rewarding what we need to see, not simply what being churned out... This used to be the case, but everyone has become robotically complacent and the old rules that made Hive great have slowly been abandoned in the name of onboarding the masses means we need to let lower quality content in and that's proven to be wrong.
Then there's the 7 day payout period that makes it really hard to put in the effort to create evergreen content, because the evergreen level rewards aren't there...Hive needs some big changes and it goes beyond the userbase.