> Etherium doesn’t need to be $3k

The reason they're priced so high is because most of the supply has gone to early adopters (and its creators in case of the 70% premined Ethereum) leaving late adopters in fear of missing out and fighting over crumbs.

> we can just pick dogecoin

Dogecoin admittedly has higher inflation, but still had early miners getting 50x more reward than current ones. If you want to deter speculation, it makes more sense to just have a fixed reward, i.e. a pure linear emission, that maintains a high inflation for the first few decades.