Mistress Ashley, your post was awesome!
I would like to add a little bit about the concept of innumeracy, but make it a little more feelings based. I hope my description adds something. I see this a lot at my work, so I believe in it a lot.
I suggest as a society we would be much better off making boon acquisition mechanical, like way of the kirin. You play it, with a Lantern lodge character, and something cool with happen. This is a win-win for everyone involved. I play the game, I get the boon, I have nice feelings. I am encouraged to play more pathfinder society games, which makes me more likely to buy more pathfinder stuff, so down the road paizo wins too.
There are lots of ways of making this happen. You get could points like in the RPGA of old. You could track gm stars. You could play module x, y, and z which are all reported, and then send in a request. You could make this easy. You could make this hard. It's all good. If you give out boons to non-con goers, and you announce it, whether its a few or a lot, you will, imo, generate good will and expand the society.
On the other hand, let's take my experience at gencon a few years ago. A group of people I knew played various PFS games and we turned in about 15 coins, which turned into what seemed like a lot of keys, which turned into a big fat nothing. People were pretty bummed. We saw lots of other people who got nothing, but we also saw some people got stuff. We were gripped by innumeracy, but it did not matter, the experience generated some sad feelings. No one said anything, but that was the last PFS for one of the people. Later, when I asked her about it, she explained, why would I use my spare time to play a game that will make me feel bad? When I explained the following year, she would be virtually guaranteed to get something, she said, let's do something else.
I believe that this situation is somewhat analogous to the random giving out of boons (except you won't necessarily see the other people who won stuff): some people are going to feel bad. Bad feelings is bad for the society, because some people will stop playing, and this is bad for business.
