I think the topic of the next HF and core protocol changes should be focused on SMTs. They are way overdue. They are wanted by many. Moreover, having SMTs and experimenting with different rewards models will produce more data to discuss any future changes to the Hive inflation distribution. Potentially removing the Hive rewards for content altogether.

As you also say EIP has been successful getting rid of most of the bid-bot activity. Not only that, most those activities were diverted to curation and authors.

I don't think auto-voting is completely bad. Perhaps not managed auto-voting, set up once and forget for years kind is not helpful. But managed auto-voting, where voters keep them updated mixed up with manual curation is helpful. Discouraging voting will hurt the authors, who already lost significant portions of the rewards due to the EIP. The promise of EIP was authors would have more votes with 50% rewards, compared to 75%.

Now if the problem is auto-voting, let's focus on that. For example hive.auto made some changes discourage non-managed and forgotten auto-voting. We can closely work with auto-vote services to make improvements there. Alternatively, we could make code changes that would break the auto-vote scripts if not updated timely.

I like your Solution 2: make it easier to find good posts. This would be a great addition. Creating a search tool that all front-ends can implement. We did have tools like steemlookup but it was discontinued due to maintenance costs. It was developed by Curie and code open-source can be found here if anybody wants to repurpose it for Hive. Hiddenblade wrote detailed post how this kind of filtering tool is helpful in discovering content here. But ideally, it would be great to see such search tools built into Hive.blog.

If we need to make any changes to the current Hive inflation distribution, I would rather see decreases to interest, and decrease to DAO funding because DAO already has a lot in it. Maybe we should also consider increase to back-up witness rewards. In any case these inflation changes should be considered as whole.