My personal feelings are that you're 1) on the right track and 2) it starts very much so with great content.

This is my observation from what was happening at steem and now at the Hive... it seems the higher payouts on Hive are on crypto posts or on the more popular Hive bloggers regardless of what they post on. If you want a ton of people to come on board, you'll need to upvote more stuff that has nothing to do with crypto as most people know nothing about it and therefore isn't interesting to them, yet. Secondly, if the content posted isn't something that seems valuable for others to read, why upvote it? Just because if you're the first to vote you'll get curating rewards? That's not why you should be upvoting, imo. If you really want this place to thrive, I think we need substantive posts that cause search engines to link the content. When I joined steem, that was the aim as I understood it. There, I wrote on real estate investing. It's not something that many around here are probably interested in, but it creates diversity in content. That's what we need on Hive, diversity in good content... not necessarily a mediocre picture of your fence or poorly contrasted picture of a random street at dusk...I mean high quality stuff. While I'm ranting, I know another reason I have a hard time paying my video content here is because I only get a payout for 7 days; whereas on YouTube, I get paid indefinitely at the moment... which makes a big deal to me. I get paid hundreds a month for my content and I keep making it because I know that passive income keeps coming. Here, I get 7 days worth and if it didn't catch your attention during that time... too bad. That's why I do more written content and will likely do more written content than "evergreen" video content. I'd say sites like the Hive are great for news content because it's one and done and not likely to be revisited. Anything evergreen should probably be reserved for a site that will pay in perpetuity... just being honest.

But I do agree that the Hive should try to gain several someones with a big voice. Limit it to just one, and you're putting the whole community into the reputation of the one. Put that reputation into the hands of many big voices and you'll have gained traction that won't stop just because "the one" gets caught in a scandal or similar. If you need clarity, feel free to reach out.