They could have made it deflationary, in the sense that there is a fixed pool of shares and all users pay over a year 10% of their holdings in order to pay witnesses, content, etc. But then you'd have accounting issues with exchanges and people saying they lost coins. But it would be the same thing more-or-less, except for people's perception that "we are going doooooooownnnnnnn".
People wouldn't have the perception that we are going down because the 10% inflation comes from newly created coins. Nothing will be deducted from their balance. There won't be any accounting issues either. The steem balance would simply remain the same and the newly printed coin will go to miners and author rewards.
Basically you can achieve exactly the same thing but without the big inflation which is killing the price.
The current design isn't without problems either: I don't think the reverse split option in a couple of years will be without a hitch. Doesn't this create problems for investors, exchanges etc? You'd have to completely rename the token for all people to be (forced to get) in sync and don't do something stupid like thinking "oh price is unbelievable right now (after the reverse split), let's sell". But that's ahead of our time.
The reverse split won't be needed for decades if ever if you only inflate steem by 10% or whatever the reward is.
They could make the system much more attractive to investors by simply stopping printing so many coins. If there was a real purpose for doing so I would understand but it seems they are shooting themselves in the foot with the insane inflation.
If the reason to issue so many new coins is to incentivize people to power up then there are much better of doing it, by reducing the lock period and by increasing curation rewards.
One thing I remember Ned said is that he wants people to be invested long term which is partly why they design the lock smart contract.
I want to say to Ned that the best way to make sure people are invested long term is if the design is sound and sustainable with the right incentives. Many others and I are wondering how the steem price will increase with such inflation. AlexGR you seem to think that as long as you get compensated for the price decline it's all good but you fail to recognize the importance of the price of steem. The price of steem is directly linked to the capacity of steemit to pay new bloggers, if the price keeps decreasing due to the inflation ( as we ve seen in the last month or two) then investors gets a signal that this platform has less and less money to pay for bloggers, so you will be sure they won't buy the currency.