I agree on some points and disagree on others.
I don't think that changing the rewards to support popular projects is a good idea.
My concern here isn't supporting popular projects per-se. It's addressing the massive discrepancies in minted GRC that some users receive for crunching particular projects, which I think hinders the long-term growth of GridCoin.
There is a reason that these projects are using BOINC and it isn't because the platform is easy to use or particularly reliable.
True, but that explains why people came to use BOINC. The issue of being on the GridCoin whitelist is separate - if my understanding is correct, some project administrators weren't even aware that their projects were on the whitelist. The BOINC credit reward mechanism wasn't designed with GridCoin in mind.
If we want to encourage more BOINC projects and encourage them to join the gridcoin whitelist we need to provide incentives for small and new projects to make the effort.
I think a huge, free increase in computational power at no cost is a pretty big incentive - I don't think we need a reward mechanism which specifically encourages crunching smaller projects. That being said, I also have concerns regarding ranking, which is why I laid out a decentralized approach in my last post, and I'm open to other ideas.
For existing projects with an established user base, the changes necessary for Gridcoin are small and usually already in place. That is why some originally didn't know about being on the whitelist.
In terms of encouraging new projects, setting up a new project is a significant investment of time and resources. There is nothing free about the computational power. I would know since I have tried to start a BOINC project before, for my research, and failed.
This is a really good point. I agree that we should incentivize new projects to join us. I'm not sure that the solution is by giving more GRC to crunchers who crunch those new projects, though.