Curation rewards + the dividend on SP are enough to beat inflation, even with not-optimized curation. Everything above is rent seeking. And contrary to FIAT, we use the inflation to grow the platform, which makes everyone's holdings worth more in the end. If the platform takes off, the inflation is neglegible. Nobody complained about BTC inflation the last years, did they?

I'm on the fence on the topic of switching all rewards to SMT only. There's benefits and drawbacks. We'll first have to see how SMT work out I think.

Self-rewarding is abuse, all forms of it, be it self-votes, selling votes, or trading votes.