Good feedback. I'll incorporate some of these suggestions in the next update.
The else if chain is intentional, to throttle work done per interval.
The minimum thresholds on things like claims are intended to reduce lol attacks. Someone could do that, but they would have to incur a significant cost each time or it would be ignored (until aggregate threshold is reached).
Correct, I don't care about the exact interval, in fact it should probably be made random. It's just to throttle workload, and also avoid a tight loop in some odd situation where progress isn't made (but 1s would be okay for that too).