So why are you a masternode operator, when you see so little value in the whole concept of masternode rewards ?
I don't. I see a lot of value in the "concept" of masternode rewards.
I just see little value in the current
implementation because it's gone so far past the point of diminishing returns. It's the dollar value of the rewards that matters, not the Dash-denominated value. (i.e. inflating your stash in "Dash" is just the same thing as taking a 1Kg sandpile with 1000 grains of sand and turning into a 1Kg sandpile of 1100 grains. It's still 1Kg of sand unless somehow the value of the sand itself increases).
Inflating the supply on a purely numerical basis is therefore meaningless in itself. There's no value unless it's created "out there" in the real economy. There are only 2 ways this happens in crypto:
1. with competitive mining, a price is put on the scarcity of the coin at the point of generating the block (i.e. that price represents a consensus value based on the amount of competition that prevailed when mining it. Nothing to do with "energy". The degree of competition is a consensus measure of the scarcity)
2. with service-oriented smart-contract chains the inflationary element is justified along the fiat model where you inflate according ot the size of the underlying economy or in response to demand for liquidity. It isn't scarcity/store of value per se. So if you're going to create blockchain-hosted contracts that embody entire nation-sized bond offerings and such like, the token value gets this priced in (as happened with Ethereum when all the ICO insanity wave hit in 2017) then maybe priced-out later when its activity declines
The MN reward would be justified if there was a near equivalent amount of cost involved in running the node (whose value fed back to the investor in a way that they found justifiable), but without that it's just pure numerical inflation for the sake of it which the market will eventually reconcile through revaluation of the capital holdings (downwards). At the moment Dash can have all the versatility it currently has with a much smaller MN reward. It's just wasted (apart from paying for ski-ing holidays and living costs for holders, but investors are not gonna be too impressed with bearing those kind of costs those for very long, specially 5000 nodes's worth).
If Dash restored its identity - as a "more powerfully versatile bitcoin" than bitcoin, but retained the security of competitive mining to keep the scarcity of its primary supply elevated then we'd have a higher coin value and need less masternode reward. The MN reward isn't about an income, it's about making the capital gain (store of value) aspect competitive alongside bitcoin. The MN reward can only be fully appraised by adding in the capital loss from the 1000 Dash. If that's negative there's no reward at all.
Conclusion (to answer your "hypocrisy" question), IMO it's preferable for the protocol to target a $10k per year margin on a node worth $500,000 than a $6k per year margin on a node worth $100,000. (In the former case, the MN margin in Dash terms is only 33% of the latter. Think about that for a moment).