Over hyped is usually a bullshit project. When I heard that this was the ethereum of China I just rolled my eyes..
The 13 block producers are a DPOS thing. Dan Larimer's creation. Its the only way to get a high speed blockchain working without causing all kinds of orphans and forks. That number can be increased or decreased so why these devs choose such a low number of block producers is beyond me. We're still waiting for something better.
If you do enough digging you'll see that most of the projects in this space are bullshit. Even some in the top 10.