We are on the same page here: gunning for quality and not just activity should be one of the most important main goal. And totally agree on the fact that current delegates are good, robust actors.
But, assuming the program will expand in future, is just too easy to have a collusion situation, especially if someone just spin up 3-4 different “delegate entities”. Likely this would create the byproduct of also having a strong set of delegates, well respected because they get more money (yeah i know), not aligned with the overall goal of the dao.
There are a bunch of ways I guess to steer behaviour in a more qualitative than quantitative way, and I guess it partially comes down to what do you want this delegate reward initiative to be. Depending on the fact you want either more new delegates, or current delegates more involved, or reactivate dorment delegates etc, there are different things that could be done. In general tho, if we democratise this evaluation to the people who are also receiving compensation we will always have -ve outcome. Personally i think that either this evaluation becomes centralized, or is outsourced to a set of large people not part of the program.