Personally I'm on the fence about this. I see value in changing it to 4 weeks, as I have personally heard from people with a lot of liquid steem they don't power up specifically because of the long power down cycle makes them nervous. I have been in this position myself where I had a lot of Steem I earned liquid through development and posting and I held off powering it up because I would need to wait 13 weeks to get it out. 13 weeks in crypto is a lifetime.

That being said, there are many reasons not to change it. Hacking is of course one of them, but as long as the power down and longer than account recovery the risk is minimized. Currently 4 weeks (28 days) is shorter than 30 days it takes to change the recovery account for a user.

Another thing to consider is Exchanges powering up Steem and using it to influence witnesses and rewards. Right now the 13 weeks discourages this, would 4 weeks? Exchanges could even go so far to reward users that allow them to power up their funds in exchange for profiting with it. They can also potentially do this without their permission and only use a portion of the funds keeping enough liquid to handle any immediate needs.

I also worry abusers will be able to move their stake quicker and easier with a shortened powerdown when their accounts get burned. I see this happen a lot even with 13 week powerdown.

I am not concerned with technical issues as this change has been done before and is a simple change. As mentioned in the post, this is all about the economic issues. Without a crystal ball it is really hard to know for sure if we would have more people powering up as a result of this change. We do know a lot of people are powering down now and always will be regardless of this change. We need more reasons to encourage being powered up in my opinion.

As I said, I am conflicted, I see both sides of this argument. I do believe the hacking issue can be minimized by changing the proposal to 5 weeks instead of 4. One thing I thought of when this was first brought up as requirement seniority before being able to elect a shorter powerdown. For example, an account needs to be 6 months or even 12 months old before you can elect for a shorter powerdown, this would help alleviate the concerns of new users falling victim to hacking and also not having time to learn the system before leaving.

While I don't believe anything that holds someone hostage to force them to do something has ever been successful, there are benefits for being powered up and they should not be earned without sacrifice, the sacrifice with Steem is liquidity.

I do believe if we are making a change we believe will help our economics, we should try to do them now and not some time in the future. I just can't say with 100% certainty this is a good or bad change as it is extremely speculative. The 13 week powerdown is just an arbitrary time period chosen as something better than the original two years, there is no math or science behind it.