I don't think that's necessarily as good as it gets. You can have commodity backed currencies. These are much more stable but much more difficult to manipulate

I don't think that's necessarily as good as it gets. You can have commodity backed currencies. These are much more stable but much more difficult to manipulate which is a power many governments want. One is not necessarily better then the other. You can't force growth in a commodity backed currency by incentivising certain usages by messing with inflation.