But it's also not really helping anything and it's a lot of money.

See I keep hearing this line but no one can actually present the actual data to backup the argument.
If it's so obvious then it should be trivially easy to show how the reward pool centralizes the chain.
The data that I come across shows the opposite.

Removing the reward pool breaks a dozen different mechanics on a network that has relied on it existing since inception.

Here are the big ones:

1. Account recovery is destroyed.
2. Hot and Trending tabs are destroyed (and comment rankings).
3. All curation bot models are destroyed.
4. The ability to reward for other types of value creation (not blogs) is nullified.
5. The only reason to stake Hive is bandwidth and governance (many will power down).
6. We lose a massive amount of reputation for upending the entire system.

I don't see anyone in favor of removing the reward pool addressing any of these issues. In fact the only time that I did (to fix #1 & #5) was to add simple yield farming in place of the upvote system... which would be equivalent to 100% upvoting ourselves with no possibility of downvote. It boggles the mind to think that anyone could deem that an upgrade. It's a mathematically provable downgrade.

I remain unconvinced and very skeptical.

The pool decentralizes the chain.
Removing it will centralize the chain.
The burden of proof is on those who want to gut the system.