Appreciate that. And you're right, we shouldn't have to soften every piece of criticism with disclaimers. If something isn't working, it's not negativity to say so. It's just paying attention.

I've always had a soft spot for Steemit and Hive. It's a really nice developer experience (even if we don't have smart contracts), I like how you can do on-chain stuff (although smart contracts would be really good).

What I'd really love to see is a dedicated platform built specifically for task-based Hive development. Something like a bounty board or project marketplace where the community defines what needs to be built, developers pick up the work, and payment happens on delivery. No long proposal cycles, no needing to know the right people, no whale politics deciding whose work matters.

The DHF's fundamental problem isn't the concept. A community treasury funding development is a great idea. The problem is that the approval mechanism is stake-weighted, which means the same dynamics that play out everywhere else on Hive play out there too. A handful of large stakeholders effectively decide what gets funded. If you're not on their radar, your proposal might as well not exist. And if you are on their radar for the wrong reasons, same deal.

A task-based system sidesteps a lot of that. You define the work, you define what done looks like, you set the price. A developer delivers or they don't. Nobody needs to campaign for votes. Nobody needs to write a blog post justifying their existence. The work speaks for itself.

Obviously something like that still needs governance and quality control, you can't just let anyone claim a bounty and submit garbage. But that's a solvable problem. What's harder to solve is the political capture that happens when funding decisions are tied to stake and social influence, and that's exactly what a task-based system would route around.