I feel like, even putting aside hypothetically trying to swear Fukushima into our service (indentured or otherwise), the practical issue with trying to use the Clear Seeds as any kind of capital, social or pseudo-monetary or otherwise, is simply that it's hard to believe in them. They're new- we're new. Even if 'the numbers' say that they have a lifetime's worth of use- they've only been in use for what, two weeks or so? They're not stress-tested for even a measurable fraction of the time we're trying to value them at- did we even ever officially leave the phase where we're "watching for potential problems"? We don't have the credibility built up, I think, for people to take our word about the value of the Clear Seeds. And I don't mean the "getting things done" or "trustworthiness" kind of credibility, we've been getting around and getting a lot done to build that. I mean the, hm, marketing or design credibility? We're not the Apple or Microsoft of the meguca world- we're the teeny little startup that will become Apple or Microsoft. Not everyone is going to believe in or want to take that investment risk.
Also, outside of the lack-of-quantified-testing and lack of built up credibility as a purveyor of SCIENCE!, there's a more gut-feeling issue. In general, because of how currency (fiat or otherwise) is set up, a larger mass of currency tends to be more valuable- more gold or more money or more food, by mass or volume. And I feel like that builds a sort of intuition about value that follows likewise. Obviously, that's not always the case- technology tends to do the opposite, becoming more valuable as the same feature are implemented in a more lightweight form. But for things like technology, that sense of more is conveyed with more features, more data, more versatility- things that there are numbers to back up. And even with all that, I feel like some of the consternation that older people (like my 60's-70s year old parents age) feel about new technology comes down to that dissonant sense of value. The whole "that small thing costs how much?" thing as well as the "it has how many features" thing coming into conflict.
What I'm trying to say is, the Clear Seeds literally look like paletteswapped grief seeds, which doesn't seem like enough for a person to automatically make an entirely new intuition for them, and for girls who are used to valuing their time using grief seeds as a set value resource, the idea of a Clear Seed will be going against every built up intuition about value that they have. Unless they have a compelling reason to go against that intuition, and by compelling reason I mean tested and proved reliability of the product, Clear Seeds are just... not going to seem as valuable as they are. This isn't much helped by Sabrina offering them for free. They're not going to seem trustworthy or reliable until we get over that hurdle, for many of the same reasons that there's a sense in the real world that older and bulkier technology is more reliable, whether or not that's actually true.
(Edit: **misses several posts of discussion** this is what happens when a post takes too long to write, isn't it? Ah, my first foray into SV...)
