Hive is a relatively small platform with a tight budget. In my opinion, the DHF should be treated as a reserve for core development and platform-wide marketing efforts that can't be funded in other ways. Reaching consensus among stakeholders is not easy, and as a witness, I understand this well because getting support for witness operations follows the same governance voting rules.
Of course, other witnesses and stakeholders (witnesses who are not acting as stakeholders don't really count here) may have different opinions about the DHF and proposals. Some are okay with supporting projects at an early stage, but in the long run, self-sustainability is the most important thing.
Even if a project doesn’t get DHF support, Hive still offers a lot; free transactions, on-chain data storage (custom json), security and reliability of the platform (thanks to witnesses), strong social layer with benefits from author/curation rewards, the strong social layer, all that with zero platform fees.
Return proposal is currently voted by 25% of stakeholders, so it's really, really low treshold, given the acceptance I would imagine for spending platform wide funds.