Instant power down, at any price, is contrary to one of the design goals of Steem, which is, as a noob- (or to use a less loaded term, mass-market-) friendly blockchain, to give users some reasonable protection against hacks.
If your account is hacked, the most you can lose is the liquid funds in your account and possibly one power down installment in progress. If you don't discover the hack within 3 days, you can also lose savings. If you don't discover it for a week+, then you can lose multiple power down installments. Still, you can get your account back within a month, and if you discover the hack quickly, most of your funds are recovered too.
With any sort of instant power down, poof, your account's value is gone in a flash, and while a burn fee would need to be paid, the hacker still gets to keep 80% or 95% or whatever.
To be perfectly clear, I'm not entirely in favor of this "protect people against themselves" model, but many stakeholders are in favor of it, and, as I understand it (though not speaking for them), so are the devs.
So, I would expect that any form of instant power down would have a lot of obstacles to being adopted.
Maybe have an opt in for instant power down? That would have to take some time, to make sure that it wasn't a hacker doing it. Then people can still have protection if they want it, or go with instant access for a burn fee. I see lots of people being put off by the 13 week power down. It would be good to remove another barrier for serious investors.
Something like that might be okay but I'm sure there are many details that would need to be worked out to reach consensus on it, not to mention coding.
I agree with you that the 13 weeks is a serious barrier to investors, and that's why I am generally supportive of the 4 week change, as something that can be done now, without complicated development, to at least reduce that serious barrier, if not remove it entirely. 4 weeks is more within the range of other popular blockchains (e.g. Tezos has 3 weeks I believe, and you have to wait the entire 3 weeks before you get any of it back), while 13 weeks really is not.
But if we simultaneously improved the Savings feature on the blockchain.. then the Savings feature could be where a lot of noobs keep their Steem.. and the SP could then be issued Instant Powerdowns at a 15% burn rate.
The savings feature is opt in and has no incentive. Especially when the goal is to protect newer or less experienced users, as well as to get a high systemic level of security, this isn't a good combination.
The design of powering up, where you have incentives to do it, and earned stake is at least 50% powered up by default, is built around strong security, both for the individual and for the blockchain as a whole.
Savings is supposed to be a bit more security for mostly liquid funds.
As I said above, I'm not really so tied to the noob security aspect of powering up, but a lot of stakeholders are big fans of it, so I think it would be a challenge ever reaching consensus to allow instant power down.
I agree.
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Good point @smooth . . this is kind of a tough topic to decide on.