The Hive blockchain currently has an inflation rate of 8.5%, which decreases 0.5% each year (don’t quote me, as maybe it already dropped to 8%, I don’t know exactly when the change occurs). My back-of-the-envelope calculation leads me to believe that overall inflation will drop to about 6.5% if we reduce curation rewards by 75%.

I don’t know exactly when the change occurs

How is it possible that you don't know that inflation is reduced by 0.1% given a certain number of blocks? This translates to about half a percent a year. Don't quote me on that.

Just estimated the math by hand.
Would be around every 2.1M blocks.
Where's the white paper when you need it?

Once again messing with inflation so aggressively is a bad idea, especially when the block reward and the DHF remain unaffected, thereby gifting the elite more money via less selling pressure from other sources.

OBVIOUS CONFLICT OF INTEREST!

Once again my suggestion would be to allocate inflation away from the reward pool and into the bank accounts. We can eliminate curation entirely by allowing stake-holders to exit to the bank accounts if all they are looking for is ROI. On top of that awesome-sauce, we can work to bring collateralized loans that use the same bank accounts as collateral to create/destroy HBD to maintain the peg on the fly.

How does facebook do it?

How does Twitter do it? How does Instagram do it? Do all the centralized options order posts on the trending tabs via their payouts? Oh wait, there are no payouts. Frontends determine which posts get viewed, not stake-holders. Our system is totally ass-backwards.