from an investment point of view ... growth is just as important especially if you are an advocate for decentralization, a 'good actor' and governance in overall

Yes, this is a point that I'm afraid MANY fail to realize, or at least to fully appreciate. The long-term value of HIVE, from an investment standpoint, comes not from the 8.5% curation APR, but from the future growth of the platform and ecosystem itself. (With that said, as you alluded to, an investor would be foolish to simply forfeit that 8.5%).

My point is, growth is FAR MORE important, from an investment standpoint, than curation APR.

• Good curation == good stewardship and good citizenship
• Good investment == supporting any on-chain or off-chain activities that have a good chance of growing Hive

And, there's the inverse, which is also true:

• Bad investment == hindering any on-chain or off-chain activities that have a good chance of growing Hive

As I've stated elsewhere, my take on rewards-pool distribution has been greatly influenced by @theycallmedan and his related comments the past several months on @cttpodcast, the essence of that being "the central (and crucial) feature of rewards-pool distribution is securing the censorship-resistance of Layer 1."

Whereas Bitcoin relies on PoW to secure its protocol, transactions, and wallets, Hive relies on parameterized DPoS to secure its protocol, transactions, and accounts. With PoS or DPoS, a truly decentralized distribution of the governance token is absolutely critical. HIVE has that, and HIVE has the protocols in place to keep it that way. ETH does not have that, and ETH's protocols will lead to even further centralization.

In other words, the rewards pool needs to be about decentralizing the relative distribution of the governance token, thus strengthening Hive's resistance to malicious censorship. I believe the underlying Hive protocols incentivize that future goal more than any other chain in existence.

And, it's important to note that when we talk about Layer 1 'censorship-resistance' we are not talking about censorship of posts or comments per se, we are talking about censorship of [1] any transactions (be they financial or informational) and, [2] more importantly, accounts themselves. Look at what happened to the @x and @music accounts on Twitter -- the 'owners' of both those accounts recently had them stripped away by Twitter, with zero recourse and zero compensation.

Centralization of governance is antithetical to freedom.