I hear you about GU. I have quite a collection there myself and have been pretty disappointed with what they've done with that project, especially considering the amount of funds they've raised both from the card sales and from investors.
I disagree about wanting native smart contracts on Hive though. How would that be any different than EOS? I agree with what blocktrades said in his post that I linked to that building 2nd layer apps will work much better than a 1st layer smart contract solution, so if Hive is going to go with the app development platform route then that would be the best bet as it's sufficiently differentiated from the tons of native smart contract chains.
Either way though, I still think that getting any level of success for Hive as an app development platform is going to be immensely harder than most people here seem to think. Everyone wants to be on Ethereum, and there are a quickly growing number of Ethereum sidechain solutions popping up every day that offer many of the same advantages as Hive would. For the apps who are ok not using Ethereum, they are looking at platforms like EOS.
As much as I obviously think Hive is the best way to go for app development, if I'm being realistic I don't think we have much chance at competing with those other platforms. I think Hive has a much better chance of success if it picks something more specific and unique where it can be the clear leader.
The best way to accelerate Hive Dapp is more devs need to help each other out with code.
Normally if I ask a specific code question like
"what 5 lines of code do i use for this?"
I get here is a link to the manual, doc, etc..
It would be nice to see people say.
"Here is the 5 lines I use. Would you like me to take 5 mins to look at what you are working on?"
Our team does the later as much as we can.
Too many islands on the dev side.
This is what ETH has over us. They have meetups, Hackathons and a lot of devs sharing code, knowing growth is best.