I'm not really pushing this anymore, though I'm ok that some other people have taken it up, so I'm really not going to do followup posts, but I can answer that briefly.

Would your proposal require Steem to be minted at an ever increasing or exponentially increasing rate of inflation?

I don't see why this would be necessary. There's not any new Steem being created, just a portion of the rewards pool is getting carved off to give to people who would rather have it directly. So when the inflation rate is 8%, you would be able to elect to get 8% directly, or have your 8% tossed into the voting rewards pool to be distributed by that mechanism. The rewards pool would be driven entirely by people who had elected to do that. So the inflation rate could keep decreasing, that would be fine.

Would the fear of raising the inflation rate be the primary reason as to why Steemit Inc chose to divide the stake reward among Steem's various types of users/participants rather than have each and every user receive a stake reward that is exactly proportionally to the amount of Steem they invest in?

My understanding from what Ned has said is that the primary reason for the upvoting system is to get Steem into the hands of as many people as possible by making it possible to earn it in what's essentially a free-to-play system. I may be reading into that too much, though. (In any case, while it has worked to get a lot of people a little Steem, it kind of flopped at putting an effective amount of Steem in the hands of a broad populace.)