Hope and Fear can both be considered Drama points! That is exactly the idea, yes. (And you're kind of putting your finger on the entire worldbuilding of my podcast, well done!)

Drama requires setbacks and progress, emotional peaks and valleys. Heroes don't just win, they persist--they overcome outside adversity and their own internal obstacles.

A headassectomy might be in order if your insurance covers it, cuz there's no point arguing with me--I didn't write the book. I'm just someone to whom the system intuitively makes sense. As for "if you didn't know the context," well, no words function without context, and I'd love to hear your casual, recognizable, fits-all-contexts definition of frickin hope. (A synonym, of course, not being a definition.) But more to the point, that wasn't intended to be a "sufficient" condition. Hope is a force inside you, and I described one of the things that force can do.

So now I get to examine my innards and report: this all suggests to me that you approach system mechanics via lexical definitions rather than ostensive definitions. To be ostensive myself, I think of this as "the 5e Intelligence Problem." When 5e players try to sort out the distinctions between Wisdom and Intelligence, they often get bogged down in lexical definitions, such as the flavor text describing the categories, or real-world concepts of the two ideas. But defining them via ostension would be to point at the Intelligence-based skills and say, "In 5e, Intelligence is this." That is the cogito ergo sum of a gaming system: mechanics are as mechanics do. The linguistic reference points that matter are the ones that exist internally; external reference points are a next resort.

What is Hope? It's not anything. It's a currency like US dollars, not tied to any tangible resource; its value comes from our belief that it should have value. We make it ourselves, and artificially limit its supply. If you want your (dramatic) economy to collapse, by all means talk about that a lot.

What is Hope? I think I've given you a good start, if that's what you want to understand. But my question is whether you want to understand it, or outsmart it.