Coin Halving - Does it work?

Coin Halving seems to be the age-old way of reducing supply over time, but I have seen a few slightly different approaches lately which decrease the amount slowly per block, or even based on a curve like with Stability Shares.

I've noticed that more often than not that when a coin halves, provided the level of interest remains the same, the difficulty also halves along with it. As this is the case, then what exactly has the halving achieved? If the reward has halved and so has the difficulty, then you'll still get coins at more or less the same rate.

Is the classic approach of Coin Halving just not suitable for fast moving altcoins? I quite like Foxcoin's block reward structure myself which slowly decreases the amount every block, or Mintcoin's weekly halving, which seemed to help with the coin's popularity.

I'd like to see more coins using curve-based block rewards, however rather than something to emulate how people expect coins are normally mined anyway, instead something to control the instamining that's rife with pump and dump scamcoins.

What would be wrong with low starting block reward, which gradually increases and then tapers off before then decreasing? Some coins do this in a crude way by making the first group of blocks low reward, which I think is quite a good approach, but it could certainly be better done with more advanced block reward adjustment.

So think Stability Shares, but instead of rewarding the earliest miners, start low and slowly ramp up the block rewards to give people time to adopt the currency. Then reward the early miners, and then taper off supply.