You should probably reconsider your assumption that you would be better off seeing DAO investors get screwed. The DAO is not inversely correlated with ether value - since one is directly tied to the other, that much should be obvious. Ether price went down at the same time as DAO tokens. If the community allows such theft to happen when a fair means of preventing it is available, Ethereum is going to tank far harder than it did today. Any deflationary price bump from the permanent loss of 30% of the DAO holdings will be a blip on the chart in comparison.As a holder of eth but not a DAO investor, I can't be buggered to care about it that much. In the long run, a fairly large chunk of eth is going "offline" (read: becoming unrecoverable) which reduces currency supply, increasing the real-world value of my holdings. So hey, cool!
Downside is it's spooking people that either don't understand what's going on or are just too irrational to think for themselves, so they're dumping stake. Too bad.
I think the quick announcement of a plan to prevent the loss of any ether is a major reason eth didn't drop more than it did. The DAO got significant coverage in the mainstream press, drawing new people in to cryptocurrency. But they will skewer not just the DAO or even Ethereum but all of crypto if such massive preventable losses are allowed. The loss of public confidence in Ethereum could take years to recover from. You can kiss the hopes of rapid expansion from wider adoption over the next 6 months or a year (and the ether price increase that would go with it) goodbye. At least that's how I see it.
I am a DAO token holder, but I'm also miner and an ether and bitcoin holder. Allowing the theft to go uncorrected is incredibly shortsighted and detrimental to crypto in general. Fewer coins in circulation only raises value of the others when demand stays solid. In reality, demand is very likely to fall faster than the potential deflation can account for.