I agree with this, which is why I'm keeping my pay rate at 80%. That seems a good compromise between giving dividends back to the users and funding VPNs and other activities like my block explorer website development. Now that I got elected, I feel more comfortable beefing up my delegate VPN as well as adding a seed node VPN, but with too low of a payrate I wouldn't be able to do those things.
So please don't judge delegates only by their payrate, also look at their contributions to the ecosystem.