Is it desirable, much less moral, for a percentage of the world's wealth be continually diverted to support mining?
This entirely misses the point of the block subsidy. It is for *distributing* coins, the only way to create coins into existence.
Is it desirable, much less moral, for a percentage of the world's wealth to be in the hands of some early whales?
Absolutely not. If in 2140 when the last satoshi is mined, we look back at how all the bitcoin in existence have been distributed, then only 0.4% has been distributed in the last 100 years. That makes little sense economically.
It's also completely different from how gold mining behaves, which to a first degree has a linear emission in our lifetimes. Would you characterize gold mining as undesirable and immoral?
Making the economic policy clear and simple is worth it, especially since security isn't going to be clear regardless. I'm pretty confident that if Bitcoin originally had perpetual subsidy the market would just be further diluted by variants that had different amounts of it.
If bitcoin had a fixed block reward of 600 since launch, then its emission of 1 coin per second forever would be recognized as the ultimately simple and fair emission. It would take 2-5 decades for its yearly supply inflation to become competitive with fiat, but what's the hurry? At least the high initial inflation rates would keep the speculators somewhat at bay, and bitcoin could focus on its *intended* purpose: use as a *currency*.
Variants that distribute less or nothing to later generations would be rightly seen as forms of grift and speculation vehicles. Those later generations would have every incentive to reject all these alternatives and prefer the more fairly distributed coin which in time will have negligible inflation anyway.