Changing Bitcoin's deflationary nature One of the most common criticisms made against Bitcoin is related to its deflationary nature.  Regardless of the advantages and disadvantages of an inflationary system, would it possible to change the rate of coin generation in order to transform Bitcoin into an inflationary currency?

I know that the Bitcoin protocol and client are often updated to incorporate new features, but what part of the protocol (if any) is set in stone? Could such a drastic change be done by the developers?
Changing something like coin generation has two major risks:

a) You fork the network.  If you make a change and it doesn't have universal support then those supporting the old network will see new blocks as invalid and those supporting the new network will see old blocks as invalid.  To users who don't want to get caught up in a "fork war" the results will be confusing. If user on fork A send coins to user on fork B they will be gone but user B will never get them (unless he modifies his client to fork A).

b) You cause a loss of confidence.  Bitcoin is based on "nothing".  Part of its intrinsic value comes from the fact that nobody can make changes and thus like the "rules" or don't like them you at least know the rules won't change.  Anytime you make a change someone gains and someone loses.  For example if the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates that helps debtors but hurts savers.  Once you start changing the rules Bitcoin becomes open to manipulation with each party pushing for changes that help them.  There is a real risk that will cause a huge loss of confidence.  IF you can gain enough support to change the generation rate you can change just about anything and some people won't like that ambiguous future.

Those risks aside to change the rate of generation you need to
a) decide on a future block in which to change generation
b) reach near unanimous consensus among users (at least among users you can reach)
c) provide updated client which incorporates changes at the preset future block.
d) encourage rapid and widespread adoption of clients with new changes prior to the change block.
e) at the "change block" be prepared for significant issues from users with out of date clients.  

There is no way to force this (or any other) change on the Bitcoin community.  Any change require consensus and for something as devisive as generation change that would be difficult.  If it has low support the "inflation fork" will die off.  If it has high support, then even those who dislike it will eventually adopt it and the original fork will die off.  A worst case scenario would be a "fork war" where both versions have roughly equal support and neither one gains an upper hand.  That likely could crippple Bitcoin or at least push it back significantly.