With an extreme reduction in supply, there will be an extreme reduction in new hands, and thus a concomitant reduction in (future) demand.

100% agree with this. In POB I don't think it will give the result supposedly sought. Besides POB is just a token without any extra associated value at the moment, compared to other tokens in the HIVE ecosystem, other than the reduced amount of tokens to be produced.

And as you well say here

Quite honestly, I don’t think REDUCTION in supply by burning affects the valuation of a token in a significant way, and for a token that is struggling to find its way into the hands of new users (and doesn’t this include all tokens, to some extent?), a steady increase in supply is a good thing, as long as that supply is finding its way into new hands -- and that probably holds true until the token becomes the world’s de facto currency.

It is exactly what POB needs atm. Reach more users' wallets, as many as possible. And also that last idea that you put on the table can help to this.

One final thought: rather than burning tokens (especially low-liquidity tokens, like POB), wouldn’t it be better if those tokens were used to fund a liquidity pool instead of disappearing into the ether?

To @proofofbrainio - This is a very good option for some of those POB tokens you were talking about a while ago :)