I think people need to wake up to the fact that the hive price at $3 for a split second and then holding above $1 was mainly directly related to Splinterlands. It was the only major catalyst which pushed hive. No one was joining hive to actully use the lame social aspects which as the time were just writing blog posts and if they did it was a VERY small amount.
The value of hive will come now from the value of the applications that run on top of it. This has been proven not only on Hive but a vast majority of other blockchains.
Social media has become the largest financial sector in the world in ~10 years. It is wildly inaccurate to discount that aspect of Hive, because it is it's greatest strength. Were Hive's growth not suppressed in order to maintain the current plutocracy we'd still be Steem. However, the benefits of plutocracy to the plutocrats are compelling, and this is why no other governance model has been entertained, leaving Hive utterly vulnerable to hostile takeover to this day, prevented only by limiting growth to make Hive an ugly investment opportunity to loose change IRL.