I was among the folks who was disappointed that we chose to add the tail emission. In fact I was FIRMLY against it. And still recognize it came at a cost. The biggest of which was the change to the social contract, and putting Monero among the cryptocurrencies that have shown that unlike Bitcoin, the more centralized leadership can change the financial contract thereby putting a dent in the store of value property of Monero.
I'm not aware of the tail emission changing the social contract, as it was discussed before even bitMonero was released, and even though it wasn't implemented right away, a ~1% inflation was listed on Monero's announcement thread from day 1. Further, even though we may not have realized it at the time, the tail emission wasn't really optional, as the dynamic block size cannot function without it. Could you imagine if we decided against the tail emission and then years later realized we needed to hard fork it in? That would have been a complete disaster.