I understand your concern about the velocity of development of chain features that affect the layers below the SwingSet VM. To be honest, coming up with a deflationary design that is compatible with existing clients that submit transactions required solving longstanding issues with the existing fee model that were not obvious to me.
The chain upgrade that’s currently in progress focuses on moving to Cosmos SDK v0.53. After that significant upgrade rolls out, we should be able to get back to quality-of-life improvements (like these deflationary features) that are possible to make with less risk. The v0.53 upgrade needed a high level of care since it has such a large impact on the integration of our VM layer with Cosmos SDK.