There was no ICO, no dev team allocation, no ninja mine, just everyone for themselves. A true decentralized fair launch.

I wont go into detail but the initial distribution was a bit iffy. :)
Kind of turned me off the project at the time. But im always keeping an eye on Koinos.

Ability to perform chain upgrades without hard forks

This is quite an interesting idea that I picked up from the whitepaper way back. Politics definitely slow decision making.

Free accounts. This one I think is extra important and something I think Hive should consider tackling at some point too.

This is probably the biggest problem Hive is facing. Not only the free account problem, but the account creation user experience as a whole is by far the weakest aspect of Hive.
There are some solutions in the form of guest accounts or lite accounts which would be a quite robust layer 2 solutions and could scale infinitely. They cant come fast enough.

I fully believe that Hive and Koinos can all be "on the same team" and co-exist.

Having partners in this space is a must. Connections are extremely valuable. Any negative rivalry would be ill-advised.