if you compare it with steemit.com, hive.blog has a slightly better editor but that's it, in my opinion.

Very good point - they do appear to be almost identical. The "New Post" interface has a few extra features (like the image selection) too. I see that Hive also has a bar around the avatar which shows how much of your resource credits you have left. And their search bar works. Which makes me wonder - Is the codebase so difficult to work with that even the developers at Hive won't work on it?