Play in the summer, starve in the winter. 😉
I agree that we shouldn't rush into anything blindly, but I don't think we should wait a couple of years before we start trying to understand it better. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't get the sense that even the original developers understood the full implications of interest rate changes. It may be that when we understand it better, we would want to make changes sooner rather than later.
It's counterintuitive, but if SBD interest payments happened to boost the price of STEEM, it's conceivable that printing SBDs at some optimal rate could actually increase scarcity and protect witness profitability at the same time. (Though, I haven't done the math to find the conditions where that might happen.)
RE: Thinking out loud: When should the witnesses start paying interest on SBDs in savings?