In my view trying to appeal to more short term "investors" is not the way to go. There is nothing wrong with speculating but the main issue that we need to address is getting adoption of the steem blockchain. If we had 10 million users each needing about 30 steem for RC no one would be complaining about the lockup period. That is what we need to aim for

If you work out the numbers on how much new coin needs to be absorbed each day just to offset inflation, you will easily see that we are at least one or two orders of of magnitude away from this (ignoring that net user growth is negative so in fact we are infinitely far away).

For the foreseeable future, we absolutely need investors putting in new funds if we want to avoid the obvious inflation-induced price declines, which can easily (and probably have) become a self-reinforcing death spiral. The economics of Steem just do not work without appealing to investors.

I don't think it helps us at this point to be picky about some investors not being the right ones because they are too short-term focused, even ignoring the obvious fact that this represents a huge portion of the cryptocurrency investor market. Nor do strained analogies with IPOs and hedge funds (who have lock ups for entirely different reasons we don't need to get into here, and I'm pretty sure you know what they are anyway) help us. Given overall weak investor interest in Steem, we need whatever help we can get. For that matter, even many existing Steem users and investors have expressed a view that they would be more likely to power up or invest with a shorter lock up. I've never once seen anyone state they would prefer to power up or invest with a longer lockup.

Reducing inflation more quickly is an alternative approach (i.e. reducing the dependency on outside investors and inflow of outside investment). That's probably a more productive path, and it too has its supporters, but one which is certain to be at least as controversial if not more so.