Hive needs native tokens. There have been murmurs about building an official layer-2 solution to handle this, but from what I can tell, that's about as far as it's gotten. It looks like the focus for the core team for some reason is mobile nodes support for ARM-based phones when the number one priority should be the tokens/smart contracts work that is also on the roadmap.
Hive-Engine fills the gap and it works, but it's a third-party project and that matters. Something as fundamental as token creation and management shouldn't be sitting outside the core protocol. If something happens to the team running Hive-Engine, or they pivot, the ecosystem has a problem.
Things I think Hive actually needs:
Native token support at the protocol level. As above. SMTs were promised years ago and ultimately have been indefinitely parked. I know that's the intention behind the smart contract stuff which appears it will be layer-2 (not ideal, but better than nothing).
The DHF needs a pause. Paying out proposals in a volatile market just doesn't make sense right now. The fund is supposed to support the ecosystem, not drain it during a downturn. And to be honest, all I've seen is the DHF being used as a piggy bank.
Better onboarding. Creating a Hive account is still unnecessarily painful for new users. It's not as straightforward as onboarding with other chains.
Remove downvoting entirely. It was never really used the way it was intended. In practice it's always been a way for large stakeholders to suppress people they disagree with. Anyone who was on Steemit remembers what berniesanders did with it. Hive forked away from Justin Sun but kept the same broken system. There are better ways to handle spam that don't give whales a weapon.
Actual marketing. Hive is basically invisible outside of people who already know about it. There's no real push to get developers building here, no presence where it matters, and the community mostly talks to itself. That's been a problem for years and where I believe the DHF should have been used for
Cross-chain bridges that aren't painful to use. Getting value in and out of Hive is clunky. If you want broader adoption, people need to be able to move between ecosystems without it feeling like a chore.