Burning Steem is not 'throwing money out the window'. The concept of 'burning' is quite different when there is fixed or programmatic supply as compared to something like USD where if you burn it the Fed will just print more.

It is increasing the value of Steem which is the most direct and (probably only) provable way of returning value to Steem as a whole and to Steem stakeholders.

As I mentioned when this was discussed on the other thread, not every application or community will have a model where burning Steem makes sense but for those that do for example have a fee-based model, burning a portion of that fee revenue absolutely does provably demonstrate that some of that value is being reinvested back to the entire platform and its owners.

Everyone is free to run their business, project, or community without being given free delegation in order to boost their bandwidth access or influence without paying for it. Asking those that do receive free delegation to give something back (and, again, burning is only one way, not the only way, to give back) is entirely reasonable.