I was here when hundreds of thousands of onboards were ejected from the platform after April 2017. All of them I discussed it with stated all of their earnings were taxed away by downvoting every post and comment to zero. I also know people that have left in the last year or so, and every one of them reports exactly the same reason. This is the only reason Blurt exists, originally solely differentiated technically from Hive by elimination of this mechanism to drive users from the platform.
When I requested comment last month regarding how to fix this mechanism, not one person provided any substantive suggestions, not you, nor anyone else. This suggests to me that Hive growth will not be tolerated, and that leaves only the opposite potential. There is a reason for this policy, which you state towards the end of the OP. Stake has been centralized in an oligarchy on Hive and those in that oligarchy intend to maintain their common majority of stake and complete control of governance of the platform because that maintains their control of disbursement of inflation to their accounts. Today 10% of inflation goes to content creators, and 90% of it goes elsewhere, to curators, witnesses, and the DHF primarily. This is not accidental. It is the policy of that oligarchy to maintain the majority of stake and discourage the success of content creators on a social media platform.
I would like to see any glimmer of hope that stake could be decentralized and that Hive could survive long term. That isn't offered in the OP. Across the world ever greater censorship is being imposed and people are abandoning platforms en masse. Hive is not taking advantage of these hordes seeking less censorious platforms - because it has always been more censorious than platforms now hemorrhaging users. Until and unless that centralized capacity to functionally ban users is relinquished, Hive will continue to be the wrong choice for the market seeking free speech that is today exploding as platforms like TikTok are abandoned and people seek censorship resistant alternatives.
Hive isn't dying. It's being killed.