So all these TD's are ahead (profiting , actually) from the AM side but then willingly come out of pocket for pro payout out of the goodness of their hearts? And you think I don't know economics?
Ultimately your posts answered exactly no questions.
Long story: The inclusion of amateurs into the PDGA was in a lot of ways a device to bring more money into the sport i.e. more people paying to play in events. The thing is that disc golf stated upside-down with pro disc golf predating amateur disc golf, so up to that point more players=more money in the pro purse. With amateurs coming in, the trick was how to make amateur registration money make the pro purse bigger.
The solution was the wholesale/retail differential. Amateurs were going to win prizes, so when figuring the value of the amateur prizes you would use a wholesale figure like $8 for a disc. You paid $5 for the disc wholesale, though. That gives you $3 profit.
That $3 was not ever considered the TD's profit to do what he pleased with in any scenario I was aware of in the 90's; that $3 went to the Open purse. The only wiggle room was if you were going to split it between Open, Women and Masters or if it was all going to the Open payout. TD's didn't make money. Period. If you wanted to make money, put your big boy pants on and earn it on the course.
When I first heard people talk about that arrangement was when Bruce Brakel started calling events that did that "Am Scam" events, arguing that the money should stay in the amateur divisions that generated it. That was early 00's; the argument still wasn't that the TD should be able to keep the $3, it was that the amateurs should get paid out more. Terry Miller at the time was running events and it was known that he was keeping some money (don't know if he was just covering costs or how significant it was) and he got put on full blast for doing that.
Old-school disc golf TDing was spending hours and hours organizing. You would pay for an ad in Disc Golf World News out of your own pocket, pay for a pavilion reservation out of your own pocket, pay the sanctioning cost out of your own pocket, drive around in your own car on your own gas begging people for sponsorship (bonus points for using vacation days to do it), call places like Innova (back in the land line with long distance charges days) begging for a deal...you just had an open meter of money running out of your pocket. Then you had work days on the course(s) and of course you had to coordinate those to get them ready plus call and beg the parks department to mow and empty the garbage cans and whatever else had to be done. So you had all that time in plus all that money in; you would finally get to tournament day and as soon as the Open players started getting there they would start bitching about the payout. Pretty soon you would abandon all hope of recouping your long-ago lost ad money, pavilion money, sanctioning money and anything else you had down as an expense, run the Am Scam like mad and then throw $250 of your own money in on top of all the sponsorship money in a desperate attempt to get all the payout bitching to stop and escape the weekend without being bad-mouthed all over the Midwest. You didn't want to get bad-mouth so people would come back next year so you could do it all over again. :| That's how it was done. I'm not saying it was right, I'm just saying. It was what you signed up for as a TD; it was a thankless job that received no reimbursement. Good players deserved a fat payout; TD's deserved nothing.
That was a long time ago, though. Things change. There are tournament promoters out today making a living, so doing what Terry Miller was doing 20 years ago isn't taboo anymore. The DGPT events certainly are organized on a different principal. There are still some guys out there doing it the old-school way, though. It just kinda depends.
Anyway, I think that wholesale/retail differential "Am Scam" and the attitudes surrounding that is the basic concept that was being mentioned.
