With 10.4T RC for token you seem to claim them at optimal time - when token pool is filled at around 10%. Such conditions happen frequently enough.

Working as intended - people that have too much RC claim the tokens just in case, otherwise their RC goes to waste. This is the main reason why they are so expensive (at 100% they would be ten times cheaper). If witnesses voted to lower RC cost the only effect would be that even more accounts would have their chance to claim, but in practice the pool would just be drained even more than today while the price would stay the same on average (with much stronger swings since at lower fill level each claim would affect the price stronger).

RC can be delegated separately from HP and you already have most of your RC from such delegations, so where is the problem? Unless you propound front ends to include an easy way for creating such delegation, f.e. a button on profile page similar to those follow/mute - that is something I would support.

The default way of creating Hive accounts is to pay a fee. The fee is really low at current HIVE price. It needs to be there as a deterrent from creation of bot/spam accounts as well as "just in case/name reserve" accounts. There is no other operation that comes close in terms of adding permanent data to the node state, so it is not like the cost is unjustified.

Once we have custom authorities with script support (on the roadmap but still many steps away), it will be possible for alice to authorize bob to create accounts in alice's name with use of her ACTs without giving bob full access.