Are they directly correlated or inversely correlated? If we look at a growing sentiment on Hive - something we can see by how difficult it is to fund a new DHF proposal - they should be inversely correlated: the more you spend, the higher impact on the HIVE's price, which would go down due to selling pressure...
In theory, they should be directly correlated. You need to spend more, to have more development and more marketing, and as a result, at some point, that will reflect positively in the price of HIVE.
Now, the caveats...
I wonder how did the AI come to this image? Maybe the presence of the words "inverse" and "correlation" in the prompt may have something to do with it, for creating very unrelated images. When I looked for something more specific, it generated some charts without any base in reality, so I thought I'd better add this unrelated image to the post.
First of all, as it's been pointed out before by people who have no interest in receiving DHF funding, that the daily volume of HIVE transactions have increased so much, that it's doubtful selling pressure from DHF proposals (which are the ones being incriminated, although not the only ones guilty of selling pressure), would have such a big impact, especially if they are done in a smart way, and not hit the buy orders with a ton of selling pressure, all at once.
Secondly, people who have their complains about the DHF are right too. It also matters what you are funding, maybe with how much too (I'd say to a lesser degree than what). If what you are funding has a very low, zero, or negative net benefit to the ecosystem, is more funding resulting in a higher value for Hive, and the expectation of a higher price? I'd say no.
So, to me, things are, in theory, relatively straightforward: more development and marketing funding results in added value over time.
In practice, the added value needs to be comparable or higher than the amount of funding, overall. Individually, it's difficult to make such estimations, as they may not be obvious in some cases or impossible to quantify.
Even overall, how do we quantify the added value? For marketing efforts, it could be the number of active users that are attracted and retained.
For development, things are more complicated, and not easy to judge by people who don't understand the impact or the difficulty of what's being built.
In my opinion, it's a mistake to correlate the price of HIVE with funding development or marketing spending, unless they bring a net negative to the ecosystem from all or most points of view (and selling pressure is among the last in my list at this point).
It's in fact the easiest thing to do to blame selling pressure for HIVE's price, but that is a general thing in crypto, and I sometimes have been contaminated by it too: to be influenced by market sentiment when judging the opportunity of an investment. And that is true at the personal investments level, but also collectively, when we evaluate something like DHF proposals. Just something I thought was worth mentioning... My opinion, of course.