So - it is coming up to four days since I tried to make a withdrawal from Hive-Engine to Hive.
I still haven't received my coins, and now the Hive-Engine withdrawal page shows the following notice:
That means this thing isn't confined to Hive withdrawals via honey-swap to our Hive wallets. It's affecting all withdrawals, not just Hive, but BTC, LTC, Ethereum etc.
It's hard to work out what is going on, due to radio silence from the developers.
One potential answer, based on an InLeo post from a year ago, where the writer experienced a 14 hour delay, was that the hive-engine side chain transactions were not being broadcast properly to the relevant nodes failing to connect.
But this time the outage is sevaral days with no communication as to the root of the problem.
Which means it's either down to a catastrophic glitch, or we're in the midst of one of crypto's infamous long cons, where after creating an atmosphere of complacency, developers scarper off into the sunset. Will Hive survive Hive-engine collapsing? I doubt it - think of all the layer 2 communities.
Looks like decentralised exchanges are as unreliable as centralised ones.
Update 2: I received the coins 8 hours after writing this post, and over four days after initiating the withdrawal.