But it’s not a given that funds dripping into the DAO must be spent. They can stay locked in there forever if the stakeholders choose.

Who chose to put them in there and why? We will never have a true a d verified record.

That means it would be in the hands of the same “anonymous”, “centralized” 17 people who you clearly don’t trust, to alter the disposition of the funds as they saw fit.

Technically it still is, but at least doing that would have been a good first step.

Is 1,000 HBD deposit a day the confirmed “drip rate?”

No clue, it was an anonymous centralized decision, but you can check the dao on both hive and steem to see how much larger it has already grown (over 100k in less than 6 days !!!!!)