why not introduce policies to make it much less likely for inscriptions to succeed, or even a soft fork to redefine whats standard and valid here? so instead of asking whether OP_RETURN or Inscriptions, why not instead fight both and solve this issue more thoroughly? 🙂

Yes, I think such spam is more harmful in op_returns than in inscriptions. Op_returns consume more base blockspace than inscriptions do, and as more of that blockspace is consumed by spam, there is less and less room for non-spam transactions.