You assume that the price is just going to keep heading down to zero, which is not necessarily going to happen.

You assume that steem economics are sound.

then a lot of the people who made large investments with assumptions about how the blockchain would distribute STEEM would not own shares of the system they thought they were buying into.

SP holders inflation rate is already 10%, getting the inflation of steem to that level would make absolutely no difference to investors's expectations and wouldn't change the % of share that they have.
The idea that SP holders receive some free token issued by the blockchain is an illusion. It is just a compensation for the unnecessary inflation. Remove the inflation, stop compensating people and you have the exact same system in place.

If they start making changes to who those winners and losers are, then it starts to become very unfair to those on the losing end.

What do you mean losers/winners? Everyone would be affected similarly by any change.

If the price does recover and go back up past it's current high

Highly unlikely, the more coins are being printed the more money would have to be invested in the future to get the same price/steem ( rewards on the platform) . The hyper inflation makes it more difficult every day for steem to go back to its previous high. The longer we print the harder it's going to be to get a high steem price, and this will have consequences even after a change is made to remove the inflation. The idea that locking people's coins will prevent the negative effects of inflation is pure delusion. You will probably understand the impact of this crazy printing soon enough.