I hear you. But the landscape is changing. With all these forks there's an insidious kind of inflation happening. Bitcoincash, Bitcoingold...and now the big guns with Segwit2x. Doesn't that skew the math a bit in your mind?
It is not exactly inflation. If you adopt the view that each bitcoin you hold represents 1/21,000,000 of the total economic value, then your purchasing power is unaffected by these splits -- neither positively nor negatively.
As to your earlier question, I am primarily in hodl. When I get a hankerin' for stinky fiat...
1) set aside a small amount of Bitcoin for trading
2) make a series of laddered sell orders with your trading funds
3) as your orders get bought into, place buy orders of the dollar value of the sell, but at a lower bitcoin price
4) as your buys execute, enter sells at a higher bitcoin price
5) rinse and repeat. With volatility, the net effect is that your quantity of Bitcoin will grow
6) the net direction is up. You will over time accumulate a backlog of open buy orders that are unlikely to ever be bought into
7) as your open buy orders cross the threshold of implausibility, cancel them. Now they are cash.
8 ) you may or may not be bitcoin positive at this point. Either way, you are cash positive
9) when your pile of stinky fiat gets big enough that you don't know how to spend it, withdraw any remaining open sell orders.
10) Sit back and let bitcoin get pricier until the cash itch returns.