1000HBD a day is a lot of melt.

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.

If the funds were fully frozen from the start, pending discussion of what to do with them; then it would require a hardfork to implement the desired changes. 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. The current solution already drops it into the hands of the community at a much more granular level, independent of witness voting.

So the choice is between having lots of non binding discussions and polls which you can then submit the ambiguous results of to the witnesses and hope they do what you want, or... have the community directly vote on each and every dollar, choosing whether to hold (freeze) it, spend it, or burn it.

Who made that decision?

The mechanism set up is really the best “no decision,” punt to the community that I can imagine.

edit

Is 1,000 HBD deposit a day the confirmed “drip rate?” Was looking for this number. If so I find this very conservative as we basically have a secondary “drip” in place since the daily spend of the DAO is capped at 1% of the pool. That means potential spending power (and remember, it can still be held or burned) will grow 10 HBD a day due to “the drip” as it’s currently structured. That’s not a lot. Funding from inflation combined with any token price appreciation will greatly outpace that I believe.