There has been discussion about it recently.
The problem according to 
Hive is also a social network of stakeholders of all sizes
The content reward pool has served another purpose which the opinion piece that I'm referring to did not mention: vastly improving stake distribution. Proof-of-Brain refers to exchanging creative work for cryptocurrency instead of computing power as in PoW mining. But Hive is also a social networking site where stake is earned by forming social networks. Those networks were a major reason why Steem was capable of fighting Justin Sun to a standstill. That battle put Steem and Hive back on the map and brought Hive a lot of goodwill and an excellent start.
If the global content reward pool were taken away, it would be interesting to see if Hive would really become attractive to millions of content creators and other users and fulfill the dream. If nothing else changed but the content reward pool wasn't there, I strongly suspect "the masses" would not come banging on our door. Would the token value automatically go up if Hive became just another DPoS chain where staking rewards and witness rewards were the only rewards? I'm sure it would be noted by the crypto press. I wonder if the publicity were positive, though, if Hive admitted its original value proposition was a failure.
Scarcity alone does not a valuable coin make
Would lower inflation make the coin moon by making it scarcer? Scarcity is not enough. Have you heard of a coin named Unobtanium? I guess not. It's a coin which is the hardest to mine on the market. Bitcoin's rate of inflation is halves every four years and is currently 2 percent per year but that's not fundamentally what gives it value. It's the fact that Bitcoin is decentralized and that it has no governance structure which makes altering its monetary policy extremely unlikely. For the same reason, it is very unlikely that any powerful centralized entity can meddle with Bitcoin or destroy it. HIVE being merely scarce would not give it any value.
Inflation by itself does not destroy value. It just necessitates doing something to keep on top of things. There are options for passive income on Hive even without replacing content rewards with staking rewards. A stakeholder can lease their Hive Power at a rate between 10% and 14% APR.
The aggregate value of all content created is lost because of poor content discovery
It shouldn't be forgotten that in exchange for one-time crypto rewards, authors create text content that lasts forever thanks to the immutability of the chain. The problem is that the visibility of old content on Hive front ends is very low. This creates the illusion that the content has a very low value while the aggregate value of the content is most likely much higher than usually given credit for. It just has to be made readily available to the consumer.
If the global reward pool were removed and it were not replaced with a consensus layer token (a Smart Media Token) - listed on any exchange, there would be no valuable tokens to be earned by creating content. I've got to know a few people here and I'd probably continue talking to them on Discord or Twitter but I'd cut down on my time spent on posting. I suspect most other people here would do the same. I would definitely continue my photography hobby but monetizing it would have to be done elsewhere. Based on feedback on other platforms, I believe it would be possible at least to a modest extent.