My proposal would be

1. Completely remove the unnecessary inflation, only create new coins that are useful for the system ( pay for the witnesses and the rewards) which is about 10% per year

2. Reduce the lock time period to a month ( 4 payments ) or even 2 month ( 8 payments).Note that the longer the lock time period the more you will need incentives for people to power up.
   If I was a steem dev I would reduce lock time period to 48h ( only to prevent double voting ) I believe that liquidity creates stability, the more the better and I see no benefits from locking people's money.

3. Increase curation %, I think it's about 25% of a post value make it 50/50 . This proposal is more to incentivize people to vote more than anything else but it would also incentivize more people to power up ( however as I said already if you only have 10% inflation it doesn't really matter how many people power up or down)

Basically this will allow the price to grow, speculators to enter the market, new users will want to play the steemit curation game as the lock time period is reduced, there will be more active curation, a scarcer token, the market volume will increase and investors will be more confident,
people who want out will be able to do so faster so a faster market price discovery, every new steem project will bring more money in which will increase the rewards and balance for everyone, the redistribution of power will be faster,
there will be no need for a reverse split ( which will confuse people more than anything), price will be more news sensitive which is very important to bring in new investors ( investors buy when other investors buy). I can only see positives with such proposals and if you guys see any negatives please comment below. The founders said that they want to remove speculation from the equation but
you know what the best thing that happen to steemit was a speculative event ( july bubble to $4) which created a hype cycle, steemit was in the news everywhere and gain huge number of users from it.
The best way to have people invested long term is to have their investment gradually go up, there would be a lot more long term investors if we allow the price of steem to grow.

The long 2 year lock time period and the crazy inflation are both 2 main components of this system and they both serve no purpose, the latter actually serve the purpose of reducing rewards on the platform no joke. The 2 year time lock period 's role is to prevent people from selling the highly inflated steem but it is not even clear why it is inflated in the first place. I fail to see what this inflation tries to achieve.