Several people have suggested changing the window time and the curation sharing mechanism during that time. Right now, I'm favoring a 2 hour window with equally shared rewards for votes during that time window. @eturnerx pointed out that this would allow a new class of bots to vote near the end of that two hour window on posts that got a lot of manual votes, but I think that may be a good thing. It would basically be like having voting trails with multiple manual curators approving the post. And it would still yield better rewards for manual voters than the current system. Your suggestion to make voting completely time-independent would be a more extreme version of that, but it does take a little fun out of the curation game I think (but not sure how many people want to play that game anyways though).

In order to reduce inflation I would lower the HBD / Hive debt ratio (haircutting rule from 10% debt to 2-3%), and/or decrease the overall inflation rate.

The haircutting rule was created to reduce the maximum possible inflation during a decrease in Hive price. Setting it 2-3% would potentially increase inflation if the price of Hive goes down too far relative to the amount of outstanding HBD.