I agree, BTS(X) is very young and cannot be taken advantage of if it's to survive. A couple points to consider:
1) Once a delegate's pay is set it cannot be raised
2) As BTS(X) gains momentum, stabilizes, and grows the amount of time/expense a delegate (especially an IT delegate) needs to invest grows as well.
There are a number of time sinks to running a delegate that a non delegate may not consider. For example this forum. As a non delegate you are free to spend every hour of every day on the forum or just try to catch up on the main topics with your morning coffee on the weekends. As a delegate, especially an IT delegate, nearly every post needs to be read every day. This is a huge time sink (just ask Stan and BM how much time they spend reading threads).
Also while BTS(X) is in its infancy my 5% payrate is bringing in about $4/month. That money is meaningless to me. However, in (1) above this rate cannot be raised. The idea is (or was before the "proposal) that the 5% revenue would grow with the system to account for the increased time and infrastructure required to maintain the network. When BTS(X) gets up to 10,000 transactions a second do you really think a $20/m VPS server is going to cut it? Mostly likely not. To have safe fail-overs, chain servers, seen nodes, etc. we're talking about at least a dozen VPS servers at $500+/month. Working for the people is great but I can't shell out $6k/month "for the people".
So, you are correct, right now I should be working for free. I would argue that $2 - $4 month is working for free. If there was the ability to increase delegate pay I would happily be a 0% pay candidate right now, and for as long as my out-of-pocket expenses were under few hundred dollars a month. However it is not the case that I can go from 0% to 5% once the system has grown to require a deeper infrastructure. Sure, I could campaign a new delegate but what's the point? The network will need the infrastructure to grow with the network. A percentage based pay allows this to happen. Otherwise you're asking a delegate to lay out a large amount of capital on the hopes they may get elected to the 101. Who is going to do that?
Anyway, this is a moot discussion. The shareholders decide who the delegates are. I have stated my case and you have stated yours. The people will decide which type of candidate they want. I suspect most understand you get what you pay for.