In my opinion it's a horrible idea.
When an account is compromised with 4 week powerdown worst case scenario if it's recovered on day 28+ all its stake whether it's powered up or not are stolen (Is it even worth recovering anymore?). Even if its recovered day 7+ after it's stolen it loses at least 25% of its powered up stake while with our current powerdown period at worst case when it's recovered on day 28+ it only loses 4/13 of its powered up stake, a little more than 30%. After 30 days of course you lose the account to the hacker on both cases.
Shortening powerdown is also bad because how our hardfork works. 4 weeks is not too bad (still worse than 13 weeks), but 1 week is plain horrible. If it's only 1 week exchanges will undoubtedly start voting for witnesses. You say our powerdown period is too long compared to EOS but they are having a huge governance problem. Even Dan Larimer is proposing staking pools with up to 10 years(!) lockup period and the 3 day lockup EOS tokens have 0 vote for BPs, the minimum lockup to have any vote for BPs is 3 month, pretty close with Steem right now and it seems like it won't have gradual weekly powerdown like Steem has. If an "investor" can't even commit to their "investment" for 13 weeks do they even can be counted as "invested" in the chain? If they just want to speculate on STEEM price that's what liquid STEEM is for, hold those instead.
The instant powerdown with burn fee is even more horrible idea. Now instead of losing 25% of your powered up stake each week when your account is compromised you lose 100% right away, GG!
However, I agree that in order to participate in PoB someone shouldn't be forced to lock up their capital for 13 weeks.
Here are my proposed changes instead:
Yes, these changes will be complicated to code but I think this is the way to go instead of simply reducing the powerdown period to please the so-called "investors" which in my opinion is very shortsighted .
That's my thoughts on this.
RE: HF Proposal: Vote to Reduce Power Down Period to 4 Weeks