HBD is backed by HIVE. Any additional non-zero amount of HBD paid out from inflation, is a non-zero amount of additional inflation on HIVE.

If there is more inflation on Hive, and the price of the token suffers more than it would have without the inflation, then the people that get hurt won't be just the content creators, but all the investors, including those who hold HBD in savings - the debt ratio will at some point be hit due to collapsing price of Hive absent better incentives to buy and hold it, and then interest payments will halt.

Your first point is pertinent to this whole discussion. It isn't very attractive, for creators, or investors.

I buy HP because it gives me enough governance to direct attention to the app I create and support.

People seem to forget that the attention economy is real. If you look at some of my previous twitter posts on brain energy, you'll see there is a large attention deficit with respect to the market price, and fair value price of Hive. This means if you buy HP, you can actually capture an attention base above what the fair value would normally afford you to.

Has that worked for us?

All this is not without spending time understanding demographics, and optimizing for growth + retention. We have even gone as far as coming up with a model based on eigenvector centrality to measure network effects of users to make for a more justifiable and likely appreciated curation effort.

That is all to say, it is still worth it, now more than ever, for projects, front-ends, dapps, to acquire HP. However, for me personally, speaking as someone who would otherwise be happily buying tranches of Hive for HP, I am not comfortable being out competed by people who take on zero duration risk, zero market volatility risk, do not have to work, do not further distribute stake, and yet get paid more and can exit on a whim.

Even if I was to make further investments (and I am probably still going to) - I don't believe that the vast majority of people who do any real due diligence, or come in with size, are going to go into Hive/HP.