Forgive me for saying this again, but using inflation as a means to pay miners (or anyone else) sounds a lot like a government "trick".
It is, in a way, except that it's exactly Satoshi's trick that makes these coins possible. Since the network has no access to resources from outside the network, it can only rely on internal resources to reward miners. Which basically comes down to issuing coins out of thin air. No one disputes that this is how PoW coins work. The only issue is what happens "in a long time" when the rewards diminish to near zero or zero.
If you don't like issuing coins out of thin air, then you really can't like Satoshi-style PoW coins. You wouldn't be alone, BTW, there are plenty of critics.
Obviously there is a difference between issuing coins until certain max cap is reached (or at least tending towards a limit - as in calculus -), and issuing coins forever at an ever growing rate (which is what happens when you set a % of inflation).
One resembles the mining of gold, the other one is exactly like fiat.