I think the Founder's stake simply wasn't properly spent.
Most of the reference there was to those that got votes from the ninjamine, plenty of those folks still here doing things to insure that we don't succeed, nor fail to quickly.
Until that malign influence leaves the positions of power, it's unlikely for us to see any success.
Barring any coded breakthroughs I'm unaware of.
The right dapp could moonshot us.
"...votes from the ninjamine..."
Sure. Once when I was arguing with them you don't name, in the midst of being flagged mercilessly for months, Dan appeared out of nowhere (I think he'd left the platform by then) and stomped on the BS, and boated me up out of the dust. So I even got one of them ninjamine votes once, but I don't think it's caused me to be a malign influence. Has it?
Anyway, the founders could have seized unitary control and fixed the problems that had become apparent with plutocratic governance, curation rewards, automated voting, and etc, but didn't have the spine. There'd have been screeching, but if they fixed problems and let governance revert to not them, then all the screeching would move to the horrible fixes to all the profitable mistakes they'd coded in when they were still young and naive, and it would have been entertaining to listen to Heimindanger drunkenly rant at them. Hive has the code to do great things, but the ability of any substantial stakeholder to tax 100% of the income of a lesser stakeholder indefinitely just utterly destroys any ability to do anything unapproved by whales.
And don't tell me to stop being poor. That's not the answer. The answer is reasonable management of DV's and that taxing authority. Your right to do what you want with your stake ends at my wallet - unless I'm violating the NAP by plagiarizing, circle-jerking, or the like. DV's don't even work on spam, because spam isn't seeking rewards. Other tools need employing for jobs that DV's can't do. There aren't other, better tools, because flags suit flaggots for purposes they're duplicitous about, so they don't want to change any of that. We have misaligned incentives in the code that make offers they don't refuse to folks that are willing to do things contrary to the advancement of Hive, such as flag ~1M users off the platform, for example.
I still think that the cabal(the irl one, not the hive one) running things gave orders to scuttle the boat.
The only evidence I have of that is the actions of others.
IF the destination is the same, it doesn't matter if an order was given and obeyed, or not.
We still flounder as a result of intentional changes we didn't ask for and are not helping.
Hive is very dangerous to tyrants and overlords. It contains the means to administer voluntarist government. Every vote counts, and can't be stuffed in a ballot box if no one real cast it (or this could be certified with oracles). These are existential threats to corrupt vermin that keep their power through vote fraud, through dumbing down their constituents, and through using gangs of armed thugs to force people to do what's good for them, or else.
If most people ever realized they could themselves decide what rules are just, and that they could pay for those things they wanted, but not for murdering brown people around the world, well crappy slavery-as-a-service would be obsolete overnight.