Answering here

@snowflake and @ned is a whale, the biggest whale, yet he is the guy who has the idea to let people reduce the inflation rate? And what if him and the other whales do that, and also get rid of the 2 year waiting period, and then just dump all their coins?

I am definetely not a whale. I wish.

If we get rid of inflation and lock time period and whales dump it's going to be no different than what is currently happening. I mean the price is already at 0.10$ so there is not much room left to dump, but assume they are going to dump. That means that they are going to get rid of their steem very very cheap and so the distribution will happen much faster, bad actors in the system who only care about the money will be out quickly and steem will quickly find an equilibrum when everyone that wanted to dumped dumped and the price can now rise.
Basically it will accelerate a process that is inevitable regardless of the lock time period.

The new features are not coming in at a fast enough pace, and the kind of features which need to come in need to appeal to mainstream psychology

I agree with that. However as i said you could have the best looking site people still wouldn't pay to use it.( power up ) Every social media site is free, you can't expect people to pay money on it. The whole point of steemit is that they can earn money.

Their interest to dump may be related to the fact that they have the most to gain by immediately dumping. People who actually bought their way in or worked their way up, might not be so quick to dump because they have more to lose psychologically.

They have nothing to gain by immediately dumping at those prices and I can guarantee you that many whales that are dumping know would actually reconsider if the inflation was reduced and lock time period too, because it will make their stash instantly more valuable, the likelyness of steem price to increase will increase 10 fold, people are not gonna dump at pennies.

So why would anyone value Steem Power if the founders want to power down?

Because it is the only way to participate in the system and earn rewards through curation. But the barrier to participate needs to be lowered to basically zero . The facts that founders are powering down is irrelevant.