Yes you're right the optics are bad.

It would be bad policy to allow witnesses change the system without doing the game-theory on how those policies directly benefit themselves, potentially at the expense of others. For example what if the witness in question had a huge stack of HBD and they purposefully wanted to tank the value of Hive so they could more than double their HP value using the HBD stack? Ya never know, of course again I don't think there is anything shady going on in this case.