I'll say this...if committee members are not paid by bitshares (incentivized to think of bitshares first), they will likely seek payment by using the position in some other way to profit themselves (and it will likely be ways that are partially hidden from onlookers). I'm not saying current committee members will do it...just saying in the future it is a very real possibility.
I would love to be a committee member until I realize how much work I do without being one. People have to work and have real lives outside of bitshares...so the only people I personally think should be in committee member positions are those who have their own graphene-based chains and have sharedropped, in accordance with the social consensus, part of it onto bts holders. Why do I say this?
1) People who have their own graphene based chains are far more likely to be technically savvy enough to make good decisions about the course of the flagship.
2) People who have their own graphene chains will likely also have a team outside of the core bitshares team who is at the very least proficient with the code, and at most will be capable of strengthening some of our current weaknesses.
3) This strategy will save resources and help ensure there is no unnecessary duplication of work between graphene chains, which means that if one graphene chains builds it...it will likely be cheaply integrated into others.
4) People in charge of their own graphene chains will be obviously biased to make sure the flagship DAC, BTS, will evolve in a way that best suits their projects' current and future needs...but at least the entire community will know how and why they are biased (kind of like the idea of making politicians wear jumpsuits like the Nascar drivers where it is obvious who the sponsors are...
If this is done, then I see why committee memberships are not paid positions...
But to be honest, I disagree with the idea of expecting any of our community members to step up more without giving them something in return...bitshares' community really needs to start recognizing that if we dont spend tokens on infrastructure and other amazing things (like committee memberships) that will require nearly a fulltime job to adequately accomplish over time, our chain will largely stagnate and be forced to a lower marketcap where our cashflow will buy even less. We have to think about it as a business and realize right now we are in a phase where we need to pay to enable the beautiful things we want to do.