Subsidy is so important in mining it promotes the creation of large mining pools which increase the centralization of Bitcoin
Without comment on the merit of the rest of your remarks this is nonsense and it's frightening to hear someone involved with creating a cryptocoin saying something so confused.
gmaxwell: You beat me to it by about one minute!
But it reminds me I should have added an obvious but often overlooked cost of taking the centralized approach: where there is authority, appeals to authority are not far behind. First we get joel's assurance on the other thread that the authority with 80% currency control of XRP is committed to decentralization, then we get beliefs in this thread which can be based on nothing more than assurances.
Users _should_ be skeptical of these approaches. For all the problems of Bitcoin's coinbase, Satoshi's laptop was whirring along verifying transactions, and you can imagine a cryptocurrency with a tweaked reward algorithm could effectively address that early adopter problem. But with Freicoin or Ripple, how do the initial coinholders ever prove that they are really out of coins? If they just randomly give them away immediately, its nearly impossible; on the other hand, if they spend years on this issue they consolidate a power structure.