My take: XMR needs to bootstrap. It can't bootstrap if no one will take it. If it is inflationary, no one will take it. The only way to get people to accept an inflationary currency is to hold a gun to their head. Crypto has no guns.
I could not agree with this statement more. It is just another way the black swan of cryptocurrency is blowing up the way we understand finance. Folks keep trying to appy the limitations of current systems to this new one.
I am curious what your thresholds are for it being inflationary/deflationary/stable.
The issues are two-fold:
1) It seems unlikely that fees will properly secure the blockchain a long time into the future. There have been numerous comments from the core devs (eg Peter Todd) and academics at Microsoft about this.
2) Any blockchain that has logarithmic decay for subsidy will eventually face persistent and random deflation when coins are lost, causing wild speculatory price fluctuations.
Tiny inflation (
0.1 XMR at year 10 as I have proposed) that tends to zero slowly as time goes on probably alleviates both, so I don't see why it's so controversial.