If you look at the y=1 / diff^1/6 curve it goes up sharply when diff->0 . The 1/6 factor might be OK to deal with Moore's Law when diff is big. But it is not doing well when diff is low. Faster GPUs won't make much of a difference when going through x^1/6 .

The inflation is now 118% pa, or 10% per month, not counting POS. The top miner at coinmin.pl is getting 84k YAC per day. If the community doesn't do anything YAC will get the reputation that saver's value will be wiped out by a few miners when diff is low.

YAC survives to this day was not because someone stuck to the original release, but because someone went ahead to keep working and improving.

I don't know if a hardfork is needed. But if it is, there is only one pool and 60 miners in the world to persuade.

For a starter, I suggest we change the cap to 25 which effectively sets the index to 0 when diff<=1. The cap is reached when diff<1 . Maximum inflation will be 49% pa. It's still pretty bad but if it is too low the miners aren't too happy. That said if a miner likes YAK, he/she should like low inflation; if she/he doesn't care, then feel free to mine something else.