It seems obvious to me that it has to move in this direction sooner or later as the blockchain (hopefully) begins to go more mainstream. Obtaining and retaining great users and curators will be increasingly difficult if the price of tokens increase and lower inflation + more users fighting for the scarce distribution makes it harder for new motivated users/curators to establish themselves. If so, why should they choose STEEM and not an inevitable competitor?

The main challenge will not be to make it better in terms of how it elevates the best content (any idiot can achieve that as it can hardly get much worse). The difficulty will be to maintain - ideally strengthen - the utility and thus demand for the token at the same time while also making it seem fair and robust to large and small stakeholders both.

I'll see if I can get a long piece on how I believe this can best be accomplished within the frameworks that already exist (or is not too much of stretch from what we have). But this is where we need more of the brainpower we have on the platform to work together for sure. I imagine the solution will be a new form of collaboration between Dapps and Community projects that we haven't yet seen.