There is a profit motive in GRC which pushes users towards under-crunched projects. No one is being 'punished' for crunching popular projects.

I have to disagree. If you make less GRC by crunching a more popular project, I see that as the reward mechanism effectively punishing you. Why should you make less if you did the same amount of FLOP on a different project?

I don't understand why you want to down-rate people who are using more capable or more efficient hardware... is it necessary to demand they get paid based on how much heat they produce rather than how much scientific 'value'?

This is exactly the opposite of what I'm proposing. If you take a look at the 7970 vs. 1080 comparison that's a good example of how better, more efficient hardware gets more GRC.

(how hard would it be to spoof what hardware I'm using for something with a higher TDP?)

That's a good question. I don't know how BOINC specifically collects the data on my hardware, but they do know all of the specs of the machines I run BOINC on.

That being said, the point of this model is that you are only rewarded for the FLOP you do, nothing else. The weighted average of all the hardware is just used to calculate the equivalence between CPUs and GPUs. Theoretically a person could try to manipulate this balance, but given the fact that this is being averaged over many thousands of users, trying that would likely be ineffective, and moreover, probably quite noticeable if it was effective. Maybe some sort of verification/alert would be needed, but good point.

This sounds to me like a lot of extra work to ask of the system

I'm not proposing that we implement this right now at all. There might be a lot of problems with this proposal, and this might not even be the best way of approaching the problem. Besides that, there are other, more important things to focus on right now. But I think in the long term, investigating a direct FLOP -> Magnitude relationship is something that might be useful in GridCoin's growth, as it gives a clear, FLOP-measured value to a currency that's based on doing computations.