You can sort of solve the inflation problem by zscoring the elo. Now a person's score will tell you how much better or worse they are than the median player, assuming an underlying normal distribution (reasonable).

Of course, scores will only be comparable if the average skill of all players remain constant. I would imagine this isn't true, but the drift over several decades is probably small.

Unless you start introducing some purely objective criteria for skill, which can never work, this is the best you can do. It's still way way better than a straight elo system though.