One could do the math, but at current inflation rates, you'd have to burn a considerable amount before reaching an amount that had impact on the price. That's a pretty obvious one to see. But real control requires a complicated centralized system of retracting the supply of steem and re-releasing it if it ever needed it.

Did someone look into the difficulty of changing the inflation rate on a code level already? I'm not sure what the opposition is (other than the fact that rewards are based on inflation).

We all agree that there's not enough activity to justify the inflation rate right now and it would be great if there was a repository where the tokens could be stored and released by some type of oracle. That might be a solution if everyone could trust the oracle.