I debated, over the last few days, whether I should respond to my own question. After reading all the answers and comments posted so far, I decided to go for it. I am not responding to stir up any controversy or cause any animosity but merely just trying to summarize ideas and propose solutions.
The premise that PGC points should be awarded fairly and reward those who participate by dollars, personal time, talents, genuine interest or any combination of them all is valid. To be honest, I agree and endorse the concept.
I noticed in the last several weeks that the Rewards leader board was severely skewed. Someone, it is irrelevant who at this point, moved way past everyone with their ranking. Not being privy to the database, I presume that was the person in question who was running thousands of checkers per day. A ridiculous action to be honest and certainly alerted the PGC staff that something was amiss. Greed tends to do that.
Once the point category was dropped that person dropped away and things realigned back to the way they were a few months ago. If I am correct, fixing the problem by dropping the category from consideration was the right thing to do and completely justified. No doubt someone was using it to "farm" points who lost perspective on why the reward points exist in the first place and damaged the entire Rewards process.
With all that said, it is obvious, one or a few were exploiting a certain area of the PGC points metrics, but why punish all of us for their abuse is the question that should be raised. Please consider the following ideas summarized from reading answers and comments:
1.The membership should have been warned. Possibly, one strategy would be to ask whoever was doing it to cease and desist by outlining the consequences on the Map of challenge checkers page.
2. Do not impose a limit on how many checkers a paid member can run just adjust how the points are calculated.
3. Reinstate the point category with the stricter calculation limit and keep that restriction in place moving forward.
Regarding the idea that there is "no good reason" to run checkers, I disagree. I can think of at least 3 reasons that justify running them based on reading the answers and comments. I am sure that others could think of more.
First, you have to provide validation proof to the CO that you met the challenge. What better way than to run a checker and then take a snapshot of the results.
Second, even though the challenge checkers run automatically, it does not refresh updates timely enough, in some cases. Scenario: you are out in the field and just accomplished objectives designed to complete a challenge. Before going home, you want to run the checker from the field to verify you qualify just in case you might have missed something.
Third, I have noticed that some of the challenges do not indicate whether you qualify or not and you have to go in and manually check by using the checker despite the checkers running automatically.
In summary, it is only fair that the Admin reconsider the decision based on the input of the membership. If I were to conduct a poll, I suspect the % asking for the points category to be reinstated would be very high vs. the % saying it should be dropped. Of course, the key is to adjust how the points are calculated. Sorry, this is such a long answer but it is from the heart.