May I offer a suggestion? I visit the gem picks almost daily, yet it is mind-numbing that they have so low rewards compared to the post listing them. That's not your fault, of course, and you do give more traffic to them as to get more upvotes, but I think you should examine a scheme where those who get ridiculously underpaid are funded by a percentage of the gem list rewards. I understand that currently SDs go to a featured author - so it may need some percentage tweaking to achieve that - or dedicate one out of X gem lists to split the rewards to all gems that took extremely low rewards. I think you'll figure out a way to do it - as you are doing with the featured authors.