Good to see you posting. You should do it more often!

For me, the (unique?) Value of Hive is as a blockchain for communities. So if you have an online game, an arts app, a premiership football supporters club, a university sorority, a local council, an online business etc etc then Hive can provide you with:

• Your own cryptocurrency for your community.
• A blockchain to store assets (assets for your game / NFTs for works made by your artists / collectibles for your football supporters).
• Online marketplace (for these collectibles / NFTs / or even ordinary goods).
• A governance structure for running / voting in your community.
• Built in finance options: financial transfers / fundraising / loans etc with full transparency.
• Incentivization of tasks and development (as you point out above).
• A forum for community discussion with the potential to reward community members for their ideas and contributions / showcase work / advertise goods / provide information etc.
• Community roles: moderation etc.
• Interaction between communities (e.g. a standardised SMT offering for all football clubs so that fans can use their own club crypto across many club offerings).
• And all of the above pretty much for free (with the requirement to hold a certain amount of Hive for RCs).

And then you market this to all the world's communities as a (simple!) option to en-crypto their community.

The value of Hive then comes from being:

• The entry coin for all these SMTs and communities.
• Necessity for RCs for each community / member.
• Participation into governance of the overall blockchain.

The underlying SMTs probably provide more upside potential for value. So some form of Defi allowing Hive investors to invest across a fund of SMTs (without doing any work), delegate Hive in return for SMTs, securely loan funds to communities with collateral / margin / escrow could bring that value through to investors.