I think this is the problem not only the DHF but the whole crypto industry faces right now, especially in bear market times.
First of all I'd like to introduce myself in case someone wants to know where my opinion comes from. I'm Haris or @knowhow92 , on Hive for more than 5 years, founder of @skatehive community and currently working at the largest DAO aggregator on the market in the partnerships position.
As a Hiver who has proved he's here to stay and who builds his project on Hive I do believe that we sometimes spend more than the "normal" in some projects but at the same time spending more than the "normal" on a project can have positive impacts on the motivation of the team to build with hype. We're still so early so paying people handsomely to get the job done ensures product quality (most of the times). If we can lay a solid and high quality ecosystem now that so few people are on Web3 we can ensure Hive is positioned to thrive in the future when more and more people will be joining.
On the other hand I do get the concerns of the community after getting rugged pull thousands of dollars for delivering nothing and I find only one solution in this.
TRANSPARENCY and OVERSIGHT
Solely relying on projects to post updates will never work and we'll keep repeating the same mistakes or the community will deny funding to projects who really wanna build some cool shit.
The only way to have transparency is by establishing a 3rd party to do the job, such as Hivewatchers do for content creation but for the DHF. A party responsible of tracking proposals, initiate communication with builders and reporting back to the community.
By doing this we make sure we support projects that indeed build and we make sure these updates reach to everyone within Hive community. We also make sure we spot potential "dangers", warn the community about them and the community adjust their votes to the DHF accordingly.
I can make a more detailed post about if this is something that Hive community finds usefull or even create a DHF proposal to fund this initiative.
Thanks for raising this concern @lordbutterfly