It would likely be more advantageous for stakeholders to have a lower annual inflation rate than to gain some small amount of “interest” that puts downward pressure on prices, especially when demand seems to be quite low.

Well this is a reason for eliminating it as I said I'm probably in favor of that.

However, if it is coded as (made up numbers here) 5% interest going to stakeholders and that results in a 5% price drop, the net is neutral (i.e. no 'real' inflation). You can't then 'shift' that 5% to some other purpose (or even 1/3 of it) and start generating it as real inflation without that being a 5% increase in real inflation (not in fact a shift). So no I don't think it makes sense to do any 'shifting' of this. Eliminate, yes, probably.

Additional SP utility other than curation rewards would be nice to see as well.

Those are the sorts of things that at least might be built using SPS, which is an obvious benefit of adjusting how some of the reward funds are paid out.

I view SPS and content rewards as doing the exact same thing in a different way: Submit a transaction to the blockchain which asks stakeholders to vote to approve paying you (indeed many posts and some comments have also been used to pay for projects/proposals of the sort that SPS is intended to fund). Honestly I think SPS and posts/comments should just draw from the very same pool, but since it isn't coded that way and we need a fixed split for now, I view the sensible discussion as how much of that pool goes to post/comment payouts and how much to SPS payouts.