snip
I am curious about what exactly has happened. My knowledge of how this coin actually functions is pretty limited, so perhaps someone can explain how the staking stopped and then when it started again it appears to have had a retroactive effect, catching up with at least some of the lost staking. Does this require monkeying with the code? Can somebody at GAW just type this into a spreadsheet to make it happen? This graph section shows the "catchup" staking a bit more clearly.

200,000 XPY created in a single day? Couldn't possibly be an inflation issue....
Basically, there's a set staking rate, higher for primes, but set. In order to "claim" it, you need to "stake" a block, and then send the stakes to your address.
But this doesn't have to be done every day, it expires eventually but otherwise adds up. So if I've got 100,000 coins earning 1% every day, I could do nothing for 25 days, then mine a single block with 25,000 coins in it, or something like that.
I believe it "caps" over 30 days, but I'm not sure.
The point is that the potential for staking is always there, but you need to do a tiny bit of work to "claim" it.