My take: HIVE would work by far the best when we have a setup in which we have the basic blogging tools only. All the rest, shouldn't have entered our ecosystem. All the financial instruments that make all this shizzle possible, shouldn't have been created and made available.
I never thought in that way as it would be impossible to have a consensus around it, but I do agree with you... It kind of messed up the "main thing", and it centralized heavily the complete HIVE distribution... Like an idea of helping projects that are doing well has sense, but it is completely tricked by us, humans... as usual... 😃
Centralised Curator teams: We have a range of (as you call them: centralised) curator teams. In this respect, I am not in agreement with you.
I would say that we agree on this too, but I think that I didn't explain myself well... Curators are positive for the ecosystem, but there is always ONE person that has the "final-click-ability"... If you check comments on the @hbd.funder account, you will understand what I'm talking about... Curators do their job, the person who clicks on picked posts does a 50% good job and throws the rest of the voting power in the trash bin... That's not what a curation project should be about...
Since in the end what matters the most are the relationships we have with people
I 100% agree! Just had another mini-meetup today, and will have another one tomorrow :)