I would be more then happy to answer your questions!
1) Is HUG "production ready?": YES! Several large companies have emailed me or chatted with the community for support for their already in production APIs. Based on my communications for instance, I know for a fact that one API hosted with hug is leveraged by at least 10 fortune 100 companies.
2) I have several projects, that I continue to support like isort which are several years old. I don't abondon projects, and hug is already at the point where it isn't my project but a community project which has upwards of 16 contributors already.
The real reason to use hug instead of Django is because your code and therefore your liability and maintance cost will be drastically lower. In every example where I've ported or seen an API ported it's been upwards of 90% code reduction. In several cases even if hug just all the sudden went away, your cost for maintaining hug itself would still be smaller then using code developed on-top of Django. It's a major enough improvement not to be able to be ignored.
Thanks!
~Timothy