I've been preaching obfuscation to @k00b for years, as regards the rewards algorithm. Ideally, stackers would just operate on the heuristic "do good stuff for SN -> get rewards", rather than trying to game the individual elements.

I recall from a theory course that covered information economics that there are lots of situations where increasing uncertainty is more efficient (quasi-garbling), so I'm not surprised competition might not drive it out. Competition might even be reinforcing it.