Isn't elo eventually inflated by the number of ranked players anyway?
The more people will be eventually fide rated and climb through the distribution the more the better players will drift at higher elos.
That's also a reason why in modern days we have more 2750+ ranked players than ever.
One common, wrong, argument is that modern players play better, while this is true this does not affect the elo ranking at all. The elo system merely tracks how did you do against opponents with a different ranking and assigns a score based on the win or loss, how well the players did is absolutely irrelevant to the distrubition.
I think that the rating inflation debate has concluded that there isn't that much inflation. Compared to the old 2600 generation, the 2700 people now are just that much better.
But that's my point: elo distribution has nothing to do with how good players are, it merely tracks your win/lose status against opponents with a different elo.
If you take, e.g. two unranked players that are very bad at chess or two unranked masters they are still going to end up with a +16 and -16 elo change. And you can keep adding great or bad players to the pool, and elo is still going to only look at the outcome not how players play.
The point with elo is that if there's only 2 players it is basically impossible to reach a 2000 elo, because even if one consistently wins at some point he's not gaining any point by beating the same opponent, thus to go from 1700 to 1800 he'll need to face an opponent that has a similar elo.
The more people slightly below his skill the more he'll rise in the elo distribution, this trickles down all the way up and down.
Of course it is very likely that modern 2500 players are better as they have better tools than players of 20 years ago, but the same applies to people lower and higher in rating.
Thus, at the end of the day, the only factor that matters in an elo distribution and how wide it is, is the number of games and players.
If tomorrow there will be an influx of another million ranked players the distribution will get a bit wider and this would also inflate in the long run ratings of the highest rated players.
I think the point is it's a relative rather than an absolute measurement and you can't compare across time because the number of players in the system influences the scores.
The more people will be eventually fide rated and climb through the distribution the more the better players will drift at higher elos.
That's also a reason why in modern days we have more 2750+ ranked players than ever.
One common, wrong, argument is that modern players play better, while this is true this does not affect the elo ranking at all. The elo system merely tracks how did you do against opponents with a different ranking and assigns a score based on the win or loss, how well the players did is absolutely irrelevant to the distrubition.