I think incentives drive behavior and it really depends on which type of crowd you want to attract. Having a long power down period will likely attract longer-term users/investors. On the other hand, reducing the power down period will invite more short-term speculators.
The ideal scenario will be to have a few lock-up options with different duration. Of course the longer you lock-up the higher the ROI. Loom Network is one such crypto project which is doing this.
Yes, just any bank around the corner would provide literary dozens different options to stake for its customers. And why? Because there's demand for those different options.
The arroganse of blockchain developers who are sure they can go on ignoring peoples needs is astonishing.
Incentives always drives behaviour. Steem didn't have a rush of low-quality spam content by random. Now that we have semi-free downvotes, this is slowly fading away.
But you're very correct in your thoughts that Steem needs to cater towards different types of people: users, developers, entrepreneurs, investors, heavy investors, etc.. Just because Person A thinks the powerdown period is too long, doesn't mean a real investor wouldn't mind locking his stake in even longer for a bigger share of the pie. Steem isn't just going to magically change in 13 weeks. Things take much more time, but obviously people are frustrated when each and everyone has to stake it for the same time.