The bottom line is that shifting from vesting rewards to anywhere else increase inflation on Steem Power holders. On what some other commenter noted is already a high inflation system, this is not a good idea.
I'm actually not a huge fan of the whole vesting system and I'd like to see it scaled back (for example, power down being 7 days instead of 13 weeks). If vesting rewards are reduced (or eliminated) then to avoid increasing effective inflation that should just go away (reducing nominal inflation) rather than reallocating it (increasing effective inflation).
None of the other current uses of inflation have this property so they would be fair game to reallocate, from the perspective of not increasing effective inflation. Which should be reallocated is obviously a matter of debate, even if we agree on not increasing effective inflation on an already-high inflation coin.
Or as @blocktrades originally proposed in the post, inflation (effective and/or nominal) could indeed be increased, but I'm personally very much against this for both long term and short term reasons.
Thanks for taking the time.
Has there been any talk of decreasing the powerdown duration of 13 weeks? It should be 2 weeks tops, or at the most 4 weeks.
It has been discussed several times but there is no broad agreement on it. My own view is one week.
I think 1 week is a little short, but 2 weeks seems good. 13 weeks is just crazy.