Not sure I understand correctly what you mean, but,

the hive reward pool is limited, I believe it generates around 80k hive per week (someone correct me if I'm wrong pls), if users aren't adding value to hive then the blame should be on those curating them. Now I know there are some stakeholders/curation projects that do this, but we have downvotes for the extreme cases. My point is that it doesn't really matter much, even today with the users we have here a lot of that 80k inflation most likely goes to exchanges, in the broad scheme of things this 80k is not a lot and especially not at these prices. You've been around crypto for a while so I know you know how much money there is out there, Elon could accidentally tag @hiveblocks once and we'd see the price soar above $10 in a heartbeat. The more important thing here is that we get users, we reward the good ones, we get developers, we get content creators, we get investors, etc and they stick around long enough to realize what hive is, what its potential is and everything else we know about it who are here today still.

Look at @theycallmedan for instance, he's one of few "sizeable" investors who bothered checking out hive, laid low for a long time posting, commenting and engaging with others before suddenly he invested heavily after he learned enough of what he needed to know and understood how hive treats its users and creators. There's potentially tens of thousands of theycallmedan's out there who not only are not aware of Hive but won't stick around to find out what it is exactly even if they got directly sent towards it. We would not need many of them to already see a big swing in price which then would cause an avalanche effect of more attention, us already being on the literally biggest exchange in the world is a big + so it's like a ticking time bomb of when we'd get the visibility we deserve compared to most of the garbage that exists out there.

So what we can do until then is make this place as good as it is/can get, "invest" in people we want to see grow alongside us based on their activities and value, thus curation. Create a diverse space for communities of all kinds to flourish so retention increases when new users do join so that they stick around long enough to learn more about Hive, start their own projects/dapps, start their own communities, start their true #web3 journey with all the advantages that Hive offers who won't look back at what they were doing before Hive.

Having said that, if we can mitigate wasteful spending, rewarding those where there's no hope that they'll bring some value to the table either short or long term, then I'm not saying that let them do whatever just cause the rewards in question are tiny in comparison to the rest of the space. I just think currently we're focusing our marketing efforts at the wrong things that will net us very little value back, even if there's been no milking/abuse of the valueplan funds from recipients the outcome of the results wouldn't be any different no matter who was behind the activities since the activities are somewhat flawed and old model to begin with and directed at the wrong audience.