TL;DR : I am against pure taxation/inflation/rent etc form of R&D funding. It should be mixed with investments per Quadratic Voting. I would suggest to create investable token for experimentation we are approaching with the rewards payout on merging into main ethereum trunk. Exact investment rules are to be invented yet.
Long Read:
I am deeply convinced, that we need to revise economic and incentives basement of experiments we are approaching. We are all talking “we should do this and that” but there is no governance body in ethereum community. Who will implement our decisions?
As I stated in 2nd part of my post, current economic structure of grants or long term EF support does not create correct set of incentives long term. Redesign of the investment and economic structure could help.
In particular I would revise the the premise “don’t introduce a token in the core project”. IMHO, It was introduced to keep capital flow in the ETH and keep ecosystem as simple as possible. Nevertheless the an experimental core project should have own token as an investing vehicle to attract critical investors and merge it with ETH after project becomes part of the main ethereum. Exact rules are to be invented yet.
Community investors would invest into core projects if there is a reasonable investment scheme.