This may be in the form of investing money upfront, or investing time.
I have invested some money. But my time investment was greater. I have been here since december 2017. Few times I made a shorter or longer hiatus but always returned.
I know that I can't ever have enough HP and HBD. Still the future where we could no longer earn Hive by posting seems scary for me. This post made me realize that I may have much less time to gather Hive than I imagined. I want to be a big orca. I hoped to reach this goal in maybe another 10 years. But you are right, I might not have those 10 years because faucet could close before that.
The inflation rate in Hive decreases at the rate of 0.01% per 250,000 blocks until it reaches 0.95%. 250K blocks is about 8.68 days.
According to this post by Dalz, Inflation is around 5.5% this year. At this rate, in about 10 years inflation will around 1%
My recommendation is to take advantage.