That's an interesting point, as many people have put in hours of free or extremely cheap labor. Even the guy who led the challenge last week, with 244,305 points, would have had to put in something like 80 hours for $500 in store credit. Less than minimum wage for one tedious enterprise, and store credit sure doesn't pay the rent.
Related to that, the challenge grinds to a barely perceptible crawl every time the prizes go away. It really boggles my mind that COMC lets days go by when they could be tapping into such cheap labor. Sure, they have to shell out money, but when they were paying $1 for 1,000 points, that came down to something like 3 bucks an hour (and since there's a 20% cashout fee, COMC is ultimately only responsible for $2.40 of that), and huge amounts of data was collected. I really can't think of a reason why they're willing to just waste time like they have.
