I think the tendency to think the hivebent trolls are outliers because they're clones or live alone or are mutants or whathaveyou is a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. Isn't a lot of that also true of the human characters? Some of those guys live pretty strange home lives, and none of them are TECHNICALLY human in the sense that they weren't born from other humans, but we still take it as our responsibility as the reader to think of them as if they are very real human beings with stories that represent real human problems and struggles. The fact that a lot of the trolls live quite remote never even struck me as unusual for their race given that we know every young troll decides where to build their home as soon as they emerge from the caverns, so they're just naturally gonna choose some strange locales. They are an internet race after all, so I imagined communicating online for them was more important than irl community. Nepeta may APPEAR to be a weird isolated catgirl, but she knows all about shipping and yiffing, so she's clearly not THAT cut off from society!! But all that is straying away from the biology topic haha.

It's always seemed quite logical to me, since long before Hiveswap, that the lowerbloods would be powerful psychics, because Alternia runs on an identifiable kind of video game logic. An RPG has its barbarians who are too stupid to use magic, and it has its magicians who are so physically frail they collapse if you place a finger on them - and a whole spectrum of diverse character classes between them! That's what the hemospectrum is to me. Similarly, since I was a kid I've chalked the lifespan thing down to highbloods having stronger bodies (re: the above post - while it's never directly stated highbloods are stronger, the fact that Feferi exhibits Equius-like strength always seemed like a very explicit hint at this) while lowbloods have stronger minds; highbloods may be able to live longer on the physical plane, but psychics demonstrate that their power allows their souls to linger after death (without the help of a much more powerful psychic monster like a horrorterror, I mean), so it's a trade off. I also like to think of it as kind of linking into Homestuck's gnostic themes; while highbloods' longevity means they can rule the physical world, lowbloods' higher level of consciousness means they're better tuned into the spiritual world behind the curtain, so to speak.

To the Kanaya thing - it seemed pretty well-implied to me by the end of the comic that all her weird daywalker stuff was normal jadeblood stuff, which we were just led to THINK was unique to her because jadebloods are THAT RARE. Of course, Hiveswap massively ramped up the normalcy of jadebloods by insisting each caste be equally represented (which also makes the "obscure cult" thing make much less sense), but I feel safe saying that Hiveswap fucked with a lot of the things that Just Made Sense to me about the jade caste.

To the Equius thing - well no, he's not a mammal, but he's not really an insect either? Trolls aren't related to any earth family of animals; they're a species from a totally different dimension and planet who happen to superficially have a lot of our earth insectoid traits - but also a lot of our earth mammalian traits. They're big animals, they gotta regulate their own heat somehow, so why not sweat?

To the Vriska thing - okay, yeah, she is just a freak. but her being a super special author's pet is hardly a new discovery haha