This may be good according to general stats, equity, etc. However, I'm not concerned about overall book return rates for popular books, which will dominate tho

This may be good according to general stats, equity, etc. However, I'm not concerned about overall book return rates for popular books, which will dominate those stats. What I want to know is how this affects books that I actually use libraries for (and for which libraries are most valuable): expensive or out-of-print books—for which the best alternative is an expensive copy on the new or used market, or some poor scanned copy from internetarchive or the "evil" pirate library whose name shall not be spoken. It seems like this will encourage people to jam up the queue for those books, since someone who rarely goes to the library will have no incentive to ever return it until the next time they want some obscure book. In the general case, it makes the already somewhat unreliable "return date" listed for checked-out items even more unreliable, so all you can do is put yourself in the queue and have no idea when it might actually become available, since there's no longer any incentive for someone to return it on the due date instead of 1 month or 6 months later.