I agree that there are competing design goals. Privacy, speed, price.
XMR wins on privacy and price (less than BCH for txn fees) but still has a PoW block wait time (only 2 mins tho)
The 0.6 XMR/block tail emission? It prevents XMR fees from going stratospheric like BTCs did from halving. It's also less than the expected amount of deflation (lost keys)