"If we have more active users, that is essentially deflationary as less goes to each person."
That is why Hive is shrinking the userbase by flagging people off the platform. That concentrates the token in the bags of whales. Because governance of Hive is controlled by a majority of stake, the whales that have maintained a bare majority of stake (excluding the Founder's Stake, which did not participate in governance until Sun Yuchen acquired it) since Steem advented continue to completely control the witnesses and the code underlying the platform. Hive whales currently capture >90% of inflation from the rewards pool, and that's the way they like it.
Not to mention the DHF :)
Not to mention significant witness rewards.
Not to mention significant (more) curation rewards.
Maybe we cut curator's dicks off. All rewards to creators.
Witness rewards are 10% of the rewards pool. Curation rewards come out of the rewards pool.
I proposed many years ago eliminating curation rewards and replacing them with HBD savings accounts with a high interest rate*, which latter has been done, while curation rewards have risen to 50%, which obviously is a deprecation of curation that replaces curative interest in the quality of content and author with pecuniary interest, resulting in Trending resembling late night TV marketing.
Edit: actually Edicted proposed the savings accounts to replace curation rewards, but I had long prior pointed out curation rewards deranged curation and were unnecessary to provide incentive to upvote content.
I will let you read between the lines here:
Reward pool that actually goes to authors ~30k / month
Burns ~15k / month
HBD Stabilisier ~15k / month
Witnesses ~40k / month
Curation ~60k / month
Edit, plus, DHF - whatever the DHF does per month...
Some folks are making a good living raping the rewards pool. I'm not one of them. I appreciate the factual data you provide because it shows my understanding of the situation was very poor.