Only acceptable if reward from inflation was directly related to time-lock length. A 4 week powerdown is so short there is no justification in offering a reward pool at all.

Now, if Steemit Inc. wanted to do a hardfork that removed the reward pool for STEEM, and make STEEM exclusively about RCs, then yeah, I'd be down. Just make all inflation go toward witnesses and staked interest and increase interest rate by time-lock length and you have a nice design right there. Then the PoB reward system could be exclusive to SMTs.

That is a hardfork I could go for, but there is no justification for providing interest to people not locking their stake up for a good length of time. The whole design of STEEM was that inflation would be paid out to those increasing the value of STEEM, benefiting all parties including those owning circulating supply.

The 8% inflation is only justified if price goes up for circulating, which depends on those locking up supply.