You say it's unreasonable but I think even 5% is cheap if it means keeping controlling hands out of the cookie jar.
Just because bankers and governments use inflation as a control device doesn't mean we also can't use it to our own advantage.
Ultimately you and I have different goals. You want a deflating commodity crypto and I want a massively scalable exchange medium. We're wasting our time if we want to achieve both together.
I claim that we need not disagree. Understanding that money supply is bimodal, these tensions resolve themselves easily. In any currency there is some proportion which is engaged in reserve demand, and some proportion which is engaged in transactional demand. No matter what the supply engaged in higher velocity transactional use is, it will always be exactly enough to match the size of the transacting economy. Inflating the supply does not change this.
The two modes are in dynamic equilibrium, disregarding for the moment the disequilibria resulting from, e.g. the variation in birth rates across generations, and they are perfectly fungible and thus linearly separable. You can consider the two economies, the saver economy and the spender economy, independently, until a disequilibrium causes inflows or outflows. During an upward demographic trend, there are inflows. During a downward demographic trend there are outflows. A fixed inflation cannot ameliorate that effect, and central banking is pernicious. You seem to think that it is important to discourage saving, but it is not, because the float is always equal in value to the economy, and discouraging saving just results in massive dehumanizing public doles without solving any actual problems.
Moreover, it doesn't matter if you have multiple currencies, because they are exchangable. Exchanging "savecoins" for "spendcoins" and vice versa is exactly the kind of disequilibriated cross-flow that occurs within a currency when savers become spenders or spenders become savers.
Only miners could love a 5% coin. But they would be fools to do it, in the long run: Their coin will be too costly, having baked in a 5% tax with no value added. In the long run it will have to compete with other currencies on marginal cost., for the simple use of transaction and saving. It will lose because it is over-priced. The only reason we tolerate mining rewards on such vast scale today is that coins have to get out somehow, and you get better dispersion from mining than from a premine. Overcharging is not good for business in the long-run.
The use of inflation as a control device is one thing. If it were possible to use it well, competently, I would not object to it (I simply don't think it is possible), but in fact it is just a means of segregating mankind into serfs and lords. You can't give humans that kind of power. It has to be algorithmic.
And now we get to the point where we agreed in times past: Algorithmic supply adjustment can potentially be beneficial, acting as a damper to nonlinear divergences in disequilibria. It is an unexplored technology. Monero is not the correct testbed, however.
