Well, greetings @quillfire, nice to see you around these parts again! I was just chatting to someone on Discord the other day and we were remarking on all the familiar faces suddenly putting in an appearance.
Coming up on five years of playing this gig, I think Hive has a future. I also think "token price" is a poor indicator of anything much. Let's not forget that we're in an industry where the 10th largest market cap coin (DOGE) is a joke!
One of the things you say here that I really relate to has to do with the "language" of blockchain developers. It all feels very much like a latter-day version of what I used to deal with, working in usability in the IT industry in the late 1990s. The developers/coders, the marketing geeks and management all spoke three completely different languages.
I think Hive has a future because it's slowly heading down the road of ETH and BNB... It'll be less and less "about Hive" and more and more about "what you can DO on Hive." Recently, we had a big jolt because of the instant sellout of HivePunks. NFTs in general are doing well. Over the past 3-4 months, Splinterlands (which is free-standing, but Hive based) has been driving tens of thousands of new accounts a week. LeoFinance (which is also Hive based) has several things in the works, one of which (currently known as "Project Blank") will bring a decentralized twitter-like app to Hive... but it will be its own beast.
Of course, all that is separate from the question of "Does Hive, the BLOGGING site, have a future?"
I tend to look at things relatively speaking. Is Hive fairly valued for what it is? Let's compare to Ethereum... after adjusting for number of tokens outstanding, is ETH 300x more valuable than Hive, as a property? Is BNB 160x more valuable? What IS "fair value?" In that particular context, I'd say Hive was undervalued till about a couple of weeks back, and now it's closer to fair value, in the context of overall crypto trends. Is $20 Hive (which some like to toss around) realistic? Not from where I am sitting, except maybe as a momentary over-exuberant bubble.
As you pointed out, Hive has something most projects don't have: An almost rabid community... and that's an extremely valuable... albeit intangible, asset.