Sooo much great information and great conversation happening here.

I have wondered about API Nodes and our trust in them and their potential to maliciously (or maybe mistakenly) deliver "bad information" ... and at the same time supporting the ability for there to be decentralization of options for nodes which in my mind would lead to less site wide problems if all nodes use the same system and then all have the same bug. But also if all nodes are copies and they all decide to do something detrimental to a party, like perhaps censor (and even if the censoring is warranted to protect against attacks for example) there is little recourse to potential abuse of power when there aren't options. It does seem like right now if you made a change to hivemind almost everyone is just going to accept it and you(or anyone working on hivemind release) could (and thankfully don't) do some pretty detrimental things.
I'm still wrapping my head around this but seems like at least recognizing how nodes operate and which ones are processing things similarly is helpful. But I also hope at the same time there are incentives for people to have a different way to getting to the same point.
(If i'm mistaken on how i interpretted any of this would love someone to help out.)

There were some things I'm excited about not mentioned and I assume that's because someone like @howo is taking lead. You mentioned the reoccurring payments/transfers. But also RC delegation pools? ... In any case if anyone else does a post like you have done I hope it gets this sort of attention and discussion as well.

So a proposed blocktrades style decentralized-reputation-system could almost be considered a sort of 3rd party dApp?... something that we could integrate onto sites? Is that the right way of looking at it? Would you look at putting it into Hive Centric databases like Hivemind or HiveD? Or would it be something altogether different?
I have wondered if having multiple reputation systems as options would be a benefit or a distraction? Not sure really... but it does go in line with the idea of decentralization to a degree.

As for a system for tokens it's hard to recognize the pros and cons for the different potential solutions but I do trust others way more than me so i'll just try to read the discussions about the directions for this. But I as an observer seeing what developers have done on ethereum with their expensive slow system the contract idea does seem pretty appealing. Right now we have a decent number of games using jsons and then using a centralized API that you really have to trust so that's also on the list... so i guess i'm just putting a DITTO here to how your efforts would help a ton with these areas.