In terms of who holds the power is still almost the same, so the upvoting/downvoting is similar if not almost the same. There are some better projects on Hive, Hive got better slightly because a few of the abusive whales powered down and dove into BTC and other cryptos(and rightly so). Hive/Steem whales have always disadvantaged themselves by being whales on here. I wouldn't be caught dead with a big stake in Hive because the growth isn't in Hive it's in Layer 2s.
The big thing that is allowing progress to happen is hive-engine and that could have been built on any DPOS fork of steem/hive. Layer 2 has a big opportunity to make Layer 1 rewards obsolete with multi token earnings per post, PoB + Leo + Pal + X + Y + Z. The more generalized communities like PoB and Pal come up the more possibilities.
I've seen posts on PoB that get 100x what they earned in Hive, and the same happens on Leo all the time now. Things are changing and I think that's good. Layer 1 is controlled by the current whales and not much will change, it's systemic and entrenched, it's extremely conservative. Layer 2 has so many cool things happening on it and new projects, that's where all the growth will be and Hive will just be "the chain all the cool Layer 2 stuff happens to be on". Which of course is good, we need a base layer. Ethereum being a base layer and all the cool stuff is Layer 2 for example.
Hive was down to 10c for a long time, things could've easily changed. It's existed for 5 years now and so many who were minnows and just earned their way to orca or whale level so far. Obviously a new token coming out depending on its distribution will change things around but I wouldn't really say Hive distribution is bad or that it's just the same whales in control of everything and if they are then that's their power they decided to hold or grow.
Anyway I'm not against L2 at all, hopefully there's some better alternatives down the line than having to pay 1% fee both ways.
Looking at the major holders of POB, I will be very surprised if it lasts. The thing with token price going up is that it requires buyers, not sellers.