Of course, it was a promotional thing.
Regular businesses want investors to buy their debt because that way, the profitable operations of the business can scale up.
I do not see how lazy-panda's 1M HBD in savings is beneficial to Hive network. Hive operations are financed by printing new HIVE.
Hive business grows when people post more transactions. The idea was to attract huge amount of new users, not a few fat sleeping accounts.
There is less mutual exclusion than you seem to imply. Yes, Hive business grows when people post more transactions. And the fat sleeping accounts are just the price you have to account with for that. We are really bad at marketing but that's not a good reason to give up on the few good ideas that have been implemented.