If all the benefactor rewards are being distributed then what is the point of setting a beneficiary

Absolutely, so let me clarify. The benefactor rewards are not just redistributed to all contributors (that would indeed make no sense) but instead enter the prize pool of our weekly collage contest and then are distributed to the winning participants . I’d like to point out that we are applying a rigorous multi-level approach in determining the winners to exactly prevent any abuse as good as possible: a five membered jury ( four permanent seats plus one weekly rotating community seat) are nominating 15 finalists each week. Finalists are then ranked in a community poll (in which all Hive can participate) to determine the winners and thus the actual distribution of the prizes , i.e. the benefactor rewards. The more participants in the poll the more robust the outcome obviously, so we would very much welcome larger accounts like yours participating in this poll.

We have around 180 - 200 contributions each week to either our collage contest or the LIL, a user generated image library which we offer as a service to all Hive. As you can imagine, this requires intense curation and also comes with actual costs to host our service. A service which we believe adds great value to the Hive ecosphere. All posting rewards which my account (@shaka) receives for the two weekly contest announcements (New Challenge & Winners) go to the @lmac-operations account and are used to run our operations and cover our expenses: 20% go to our three moderators, 30% to our developer, ~15% are reserved for hosting our web service and ~35% are accumulated to build our operational reserve. Supporting all this with my own vote is something I consider appropriate use of my stake. In addition to these two posts from my account, our weekly contest cycle comprises two more posts from the @lmac account (Final Poll & Top Picks LMAC trail). Posting rewards from these two posts, which I support with my vote too, either go to the contest prize pool (@lmac), our operations (@lmac-operations) or directly to the three top picks.

So this is the flow of rewards into and within the LMAC. It's all supposed to be fully transparent and verifiable. If you are committed to have a closer look yourself we would actually more than welcome that. If something doesn’t sit right with you I would be the first who would like to know. In fact, your inquiry already prompted us to consider publishing regular accounting reports (e.g. once per month with posting rewards either going to null or the DHF) so that nobody even needs to dive into transaction histories to follow the flow of rewards within the LMAC. We will look into this as soon as I’m back in my normal environment in about two weeks.