How long do you figure this little post will last there?
Now imagine if instead of spending those million bitcoins per year on electricity, they were spent on hiring developers, and marketing, and infrastructure, even Super Bowl ads! Suppose there was technology just sitting there off the shelf that replaced mining with useful work. There are developers right now getting paid this way to work on next generation technology for blockchains with transaction times of 10 seconds not 10 minutes. Technology is marching on (like it does everywhere else).
You point out that as long as Bitcoin grows at 10% a year it can break even. But wouldn't it get accepted even faster if those resources paid for growth? And with that growth, the buying power of those new coins would grow even faster.
Bitcoin could become a rocket ship if it generated thrust instead of heat with its increasing coin supply. It could pay 100 small businesses a revenue stream of several million dollars a year each to grow the ecosystem. All those employees might still sell their new coins for food creating the same down pressure we are seeing today, but at least they would be doing something useful as a by-product.
Do we really think that 10 years from now Bitcoin will be using the same technology it does today? Does anything else stand still like that? If it must surely upgrade sometime before then, why not now?
Will Bitcoin wait till other competitors, who use their supply generating fuel for thrust instead of heat, go zipping past it?
Bitcoin is a philosophy. It is a set of ideals. It is a vision. That's what's important. It is not a fixed technology.
Here's a keynote address from Beyond Bitcoin in Las Vegas which makes this case. Let's keep our technology up to date and rally around the Bitcoin vision instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U44MujtVj00