Hey @jesta, thanks for all your contributions to Steem. The conundrum in this post resonates with me. The trio of priorities makes sense; infrastructure is where the ecosystem needs the most help IMO. So many cool dev-tools and user-apps to build, but your experience lends itself to writing important services others couldn't.
I don't know what your exact requirements are for chainBB but I wonder if there could be any overlap with hive/communities going forward. The goal is that the backend is good enough that devs want to use it as a shared service/standard.
There may be some overlap in the future - I have yet to really dig into hive besides the couple times I poked at the code. It'll definitely be something I look at when I revisit the concept of chainBB.
I'm also glad you took the time to response and that this resonates with you as well. I have a lot of respect for what you're building and working on within the Steem ecosystem and think that work is crucial towards our growth. Thanks :)