As I have said several times now (though not only in this thread), I don't consider it to be real inflation and therefore I don't consider it to be a candidate funding source at all.

If you pay 100%/y inflation back to investors it means everyone ends up with twice as many tokens and the price is probably half, so apart from psychological factors in terms of price charts, it has almost no effect in underlying economics. That is not real inflation, and it doesn't constitute a 'funding source' where you could then take that same 100% inflation, start paying it to non-investors and not have that be an enormous increase to the real inflation in terms of underlying economics.

The actual situation with the vesting reward is the same very thing, although the numbers are obviously smaller (disregarding the effect on cost shifting between STEEM and SP, which is of debatable value).