I don't understand how a difference in amount of coins would change literally anything?
There's over 100m unstaked as far as I know, BT has over half of all staked Hive voting for him, more inflation wouldn't change anything as far as I know. What would is getting people to not hold their coins on exchanges and maybe also enable liquid Hive voting for the traders, but maybe to a lower effect than staked ones as they're supposed to have the risk of having their tokens locked if the put the blockchain in danger. A lot of different scenarios here to take into account but it's way past midnight for me to think clearly and deep about all possibilities and what vectors of attack these changes would open.
Very true. Exchanges ate a huge problem as well