Ok, lets forget about "voting" and "bitcoin foundation" for the moment.
How about hedge funds contact core devs and tell them: "guys, in order to make this thing would-wide spread we need a controlled inflation: we need to remove "halving". Lets say for solving a block it will always be N number of coins. You guys will be rich, famous and your names will be written in history forever. From our side we guarantee at least 51% of mining power with the updated bitcoin protocol where there is no 21M limitation anymore. The garage miners could stick to the old protocol or whatever - their old bitcoins are useless".
I think this is very possible if we are talking about wide adoption of bitcoin.
They will be rich and famous either way when mass adoption comes. The only realistic possibility of this kind of change might be a POS protocol to keep it around 21 million in circulation but this would be 50-60 years away at least.