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Naturally, I find the fact that there are no natlang analogs to xoi'a and
xoi'e (especially with respect to a direct treatment of "linear" and
"exponential" functions) a very Good Thing. It's been said that the
greatest human failing has been to misunderstand the exponential function.
(.iseju Lojban is interesting because it enables us to evade natlang
commonalities that were evolved largely by people who had head lice, and
incorporate insights that have occurred in the past 300 years.)
za'u and me'i, if overloaded to be appropriate for this discussion, can
only refer to the next infinitesimal (which, when restricted to integers,
means the next integer). As such that might be useful for treating the
concept of "next", but not powerful enough to distinguish between linear
and exponential increases. Another argument is that they refer not to
values but to ranges!
As for overspecificity, when compared to the tenses of ta'e or the
variants of nu, I hardly think that charge sticks.
We can use tenses like xoi'a, but if we had numbers (the sort of
pseudo-digits unique to Lojban, like du'e) that signalled different types
of increase, this could be a more general solution. If xoi'a'a meant
linear increase, then
mi ja'a xi xoi'a'a plana (my obesity increases linearly)
mi patfu ni'u xoi'a'a da (I am father of a brood that's decreasing
linearly in number)
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