I've always supported the idea of incentivised nodes, in fact it's why I invested in the first place. But it's a question of degree.

I didn't think too much about it until this proposal came up, in fact when DCG presented the idea in December.

If you're a crypto person, you tend to get used to the idea that coins just "pop" out of the blockchain with value attached to the.
If you're an economist you're also quite comfortable with the idea that "money printing" has a viable basis.
But if you're a bookkeeper and you see revenue then you're always looking for the other side of the entry to see where the expense is and whether it's viable.

(I'm not a bookkeeper, just half a lifetime of building accounting systems in software for companies).

This set me off down the path of actually analysing the mining business model and accounting for the various capital flows. To me crypto isn't inherently valuable. It has value because it catalyses capital flows between real people in the real world. In doing that I came to the conclusion that the problem has been wrongly framed (in terms of minimising the flow of mining rewards to market) and when you frame it more completely, you come to the opposite conclusion: that all of the primary supply of always sold regardless of relative reward ratio and that the masternode margin causes us to have to draw a lot more fiat from markets than Bitcoin and Litecoin et al do for the same proportional supply production.

See for example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg54754054#msg54754054

I was also very skeptical of the assertion that "we don't need all this hashrate". I think we're about to find out that we do - or at least we need a large part of our supply to be as competitively mined as possible if it isn't doing some other job that delivers measurable value back to the investor.

Saying we have "value added" features like instantsend and privatesend is true but not really relevant to the economics of things. These features don't cost the masternodes anything to support relative to the revenue they draw from the network.

Most of all I'm gobsmacked at the lack of effort to explain or account for the reason that the split reward ratio has not made us more competitive compared with our 100% mined counterparts. Instead we're just doubling down on even more. The evidence is there staring us in the face and we choose to ignore it, citing all sorts of ridiculous excuses such as "first mover advantage" or "bias". Anything except consider that the mining business model might actually have a basis to it in stabilising the asset as a store of value.

I find that reckless.