*puts his tinfoil hat on*

and back on topic, shall we?
as for your suggestion about "smart picks" i would say thats how the game should work in the first place. i have suggested this to pick the gems over chests, over xp over coins over creds several months ago because i was mad returning to the game after a few hours, seeing having currently credits stake with 10 minutes left and a 100 gemstake up for pick and refresh in 8 minutes ... its frustrating i know and it has happened many times.
i am hoping the intentions are that we dont get a 1k gemstake in every realm daily and others start to exploit it, but it would be great if there could be default picks set if an autoclaimer is online or not.

that being said, there is a couple of stages where everyone is like "now that is NOT a reason to become VIP" like in especially the VIP 8 rewards:
1. you can claim lv8 rewards (10m coins, 5m creds, a tiger (WTF!?!?!?) and 20k chips... yay \o/
2. you keep all previous benefits

i dare to say that the higher your vip gets after level 7, the less you care about the benefits resulting into it, except for the 5th lab (which they make you pay precious gems for)


as for suggesting a better incentive, i think it would a great idea to give the vip's some vip exclusive mounts, double up stamina bonus (the daily bonus only = 2x20 instead of 2x10), additional discount on gem purchases, discount on gem feeds for pets, auto feeds for pets. for the heck of it, why not party HP bonus!?!? ... there is so many different things you can do with that and it doesnt seem to be a priority to take care of their top customers at all and it seems to be more of a priority to let others 'catch up' rather than widen the gap and benefit the high spenders who are responsible for their GM's daily bread.