I agree with you, the value is extremely subjective. One personz $1 is another personz $50. When the money isn't coming out of your pocket, the amounts could be wild.

You bring up a really good technical point, how to decide the actual payout. It should obviously be SP weighed, regardless of how many votes (as it is now), but then we're really just deciding a proportion of the reward pool. So it would be (total reward pool value / total suggested reward value) * this suggested reward value = this actual reward value. The actual reward value would almost certainly never be the suggested.

The counter argument to this is that a consensus could probably form along similar lines as it has now. In the beginning the rewards would be all over the place, and then as people get used to the system and more importantly, get used to the payouts they get, they will probably gravitate towards similar values.

This might be a really bad thing or maybe not! It's really hard to know, but I have the impression @dan (RIP) would not have agreed. Maybe that matters less now than it ever did. You could add to this @dragosroua 's suggestion that we have "skin in the game", i.e. it also costs the voter to up or down vote. I am speculatively certain that this would keep rewards much lower, but might even drive us to "undervalue" posts.

I think the problem with both of these ideas is that they have unknown group behavior outcomes, but then again, we're here to try things out right? 😄