You have a good point, the rewards pool is not economically sustainable and does not work in a way that creates value. Looking forward to RC delegations, though I would prefer a decentralised protocol for that like EOS rex over a centralised solution like dlease.
Why should developers integrate/build on Hive
That's going to be a tough one. Nothing against custom json's, but with the recent events, for many the reliability/decentralisation of DPOS-based chains is questionable. While high fees and centralisation in mining pools are a problem of POW chains, upcoming solutions like Ethereum's 2.0 POW/POS-combination seem much more appealing, especially for applications that care about the immutability of user funds.
Bigger blockchains offer VC funds, support for transaction costs (Hive-equivalent: RC) or other incentives for developers building on their chain. Hive's HPS can't compete with that currently, currently almost exclusively projects benefiting the whole ecosystem get funded while apps without connections to large stakeholders don't have a chance.
You take a look at hive.blog and upvote a post. There are no rewards, just likes & dislikes. Because you want to support that individual anyway, you direct a percentage cap of 0.5% of your staking rewards to him/her; with a daily-cap of 4 HIVE, a total cap of 25 HIVE and a max duration of 2 weeks.
Isn't that what Whaleshares is doing? They haven't been particularly successful with removing author/curation rewards. Proof of brain used to be Steem's/Hive's big selling point (also for SMTs/HMTs), still wondering if something could be tweaked to make a rewards pool work.. HF21/22 brought some improvements at least by making vote selling less profitable
Good point!
Because whaleshares is garbage. I really don't understand how they fit into the equation, just because they made some changes that are seemingly somewhat similar (which it isn't IMO).
Because Ned was too lazy to shift gears. He announced SMTs in 2017. That was the right time to release them. Right now, we should fix Hive first before we release sub-tokens IMO.
The code is done though, isn't it? Only some testing remains.
Releasing SMTs will allow apps to have their own PoB going on, even if we know it doesn't work perfectly. Other's might just use it as a security (like ICOs with Eth) or a fun way to create their own coin.
It is extremely powerful to allow people to create their own crypto with a few clicks. This should definitely be released as it is, and the main Hive token can then change to work as you described in your post.