Although I am pro reducing rewards in general (not just for miners) due to the inflationary effect, there are a couple of points in this proposal that might be misunderstood.
Firstly, the pool of zil that is allocated to miner rewards is not directly controlled by Zilliqa Research or any other entity, so these rewards could not be easily reallocated to developers, users, gZIL holders etc as proposed without a network upgrade and creation of some kind of DAO treasury.
Secondly, until the switch to PoS is complete, PoW miners are very much a necessary part of Zilliqa’s infrastructure, and taking any action that reduces the number of miners objectively reduces the security of the network. Generally speaking 10-20% of rewards that miners sell will be profit – the vast majority goes towards covering electricity and hardware maintenance costs, so it’s not a particularly lucrative operation unless you have access to free electricity.
I note that this second point has point been addressed in the proposal by increasing the number of guard nodes (those maintained by Zilliqa Research), but 1) this would result in centralisation of the network and 2) maintaining such hardware is expensive – I would personally rather Zilliqa Research’s resources were targeted at incentive programs for the adoption of Zilliqa 2.0.
Here is some insight on mining costs from @vp_ezil, operator of the Ezil mining pool who ceased their mining operation earlier this year due to lack of profitability: