Despite your best efforts, sometimes it's beyond your control especially when you make plans where the outcome is at the mercy of other people's cooperation. Building a community is like that, most of the time people engage out of rewards motivation than being invested in what you envision on the long term. You can make all the right moves but failure can still happen and that outcome does not necessarily mean its all on you. Hive as a general ecosystem fails at marketing more users on the blogging side even when there is much more $ to be made just by sharing an opinion or a hobby.

The same advice still applies, get involved with stuff you don't want to regret if you get called out for and promptly make amends if needed. Get interested in the community so that the community can have more reasons to get interested in you and growth takes time, months or years. It's only after 3 years did I even get to reach the level of rewards I consistently get now. I attribute it to just being surrounded by people whom I just interdependently provide value along with.

If you look at the top earners, the consistent ones are usually those with their comment sections filled with activities and getting more involvement with other people. There are outliers of course, plenty of those just posting for a quota because these accounts weren't intended to be built to be a community player.

I delegated some HP to a few of my communities so they could engage (they don’t though, I just do that personally…that may be an issue. Am I failing at managing my communities if I don’t use the accounts to do much?)

Part of the underlying problem with community building is trying to motivate someone that doesn't see value in the effort. You can give people more income sources from the blockchain but they'll only see that as an income source and less about what you're trying to build on the long term.

It sucks but this is what most people are wired when they enter the blockchain but some can grow out of that motivation and get behind what project you're running with. It's going to stretch your patience but this is how I eventually found like-minded people when I stuck long enough. So the right community members you wish you had may just not be familiar with Hive yet. (I met my groups after 2 years of exploration since I've been on multiple communities on Hive.) Good luck on that journey and thank you for the thoughtful reply :>