Good post. The Hive Watchers thing (or just the potential for whales to mess things up) does rightly scare off a lot of people.

But, if you view Hive as an immutable blockchain that you can use without caring about creator rewards or winning DAO proposals, it gets easier.

I think of the DAO and voting as an app built on top of Hive, not as Hive itself (even though it is).