depending on what the richest people want
It's not really what "the richest" want. There are probably people richer than me with smaller stakes and who knows I might be richer than some of the people with bigger stakes.
Nobody cares how rich you are, what matters is how much stake you have, and this matters for smaller stakeholders too. If all of the bigger stakeholders agree on direction, that's usually how it is going to go, but often larger stakeholders don't agree or don't care, and the influence of smaller stakeholders is magnified. This is all very much like any business with shareholders, and not all that strange once you recognize it for what it is.
By 'rich' I meant 'have the ability to access whatever stake is needed to affect change to the blockchain'.
I'm just pointing out that any niggles that exist in potential investors' minds regarding the governance and stake can be minimised by very clear delineation of every part of the system in easy to understand terms. e.g. 'author reward pool is for authors of posts by content creators' and DHF is for development. Even if the numbers are adjusted so that authors gain nothing by the change and the same money is moved into DEV somehow without the upvoting - it would imo result in a better taste in the mouth for many observers. Minimising niggles is important at this point I think because there is so much negative perception of Steem and Hive - often unwarranted, but there's no way to clean it up without being super focused on the small points.
One thing I've suggested is to route all the inflation (except maybe some or all of witness rewards, which are needed for operational security) through DHF. Stakeholders could then vote a desired amount into a better-defined content fund (or multiple funds), to the extent that this is seen as a useful expense for marketing, airdrop, etc. It could also go to subsidize second layer communities/platforms, to the extent they are seen as helping to promote or grow Hive (some of the existing DHF proposals are close to this).
No one seems to see this as a big priority with limited development resources (and I don't disagree necessarily), to the extent it is even agreed with at all as a concept (likely mixed).
I think that could well be a good move, but as you say would really be an experiment that would likely cost quite a bit to code and test. Maybe a layer 2 implementation of this in the layer 2 reward pools might be more manageable. In general I see layer 2 spaces as an opportunity for experimentation and want to see the cost of entry to them lowered as much as possible. If the cost is lowered close to zero then they can literally be test spaces for changes to the user experience of layer 1, among other things.
I expect that in the coming year I will be working on customising more than one layer 2 token, so I'll be exploring the options for expansion/change - at the moment I don't really know what is and isn't possible.