Regarding #1, I think policy has to be the way it is to cover unforeseen circumstances. What if someone has to go to the hospital before pool registration finishes? Are we really going to add to their bad day and give them a penalty, or withhold product they've ostensibly paid for? And if we make this particular scenario an exception to the rule, well, now we've just made the rules more complicated and given judges a harder time giving consistent rulings.

Just like other areas of policy, there are two ways to write this: favour dropping (even for lucrative pools), or penalize dropping (even for emergencies). The way it's written now causes the least “feel-bad” moments, even though it benefits certain others in a way we'd prefer didn't happen: it's basically the lesser of two evils.

Regarding players buying into a better pool, it's worth noting that they'll still have to give that pool away after registering it, and the players shouldn't realistically have any way to know where that pool will end up, which limits the opportunity for collusion.

However, there is still the problem of players buying into a WORSE pool to pass to their potential opponents, so the integrity issue is still a very real concern.

I'm not sure there needs to be any more discussion on this so I'm closing the thread.