Thanks for the well laid out response. I hadn't thought of the effect that the reverse-auction window would have, or the act of late-voting, either. Also -- a lot of the 'market interaction' stuff is still a ways over my head (which also explains why I don't really dabble in trading, either).

As a follow up question:

Rather than the way STEEM currently generates (or maybe 'allocates' is a better word) inflation for the reward pool (i.e. the constant, set % of all inflation) -- would it possible to have this tweaked in a future HF so that more or less inflation can be attributed to the reward pool based on the "value consensus" of content being created?

I doubt I did a very good job of explaining that -- but maybe a simple version is:

• Maybe days where quality content producers publish new content, there are more positive rshares being distributed, which would increase the allocation to the reward pool (to a certain maximum cap, probably); while
• On days where it's nothing but shitposts, and people are generally just downvoting spam, the mechanism / algorithm would hold back from increasing the reward pool as much.

Kinda skipping the 'middle man' of burning tokens, and prevents shit-posts from gaining a larger share of a fixed-pie if most curators turn to apathy towards voting.

I don't know a lot about the STEEM backend, so it's probably convoluted and a non-starter for various technical / logistic reasons, but it seems like it makes sense to "only mint coins when there's something worth paying for".

Regardless -- thanks for your thoughts.