I would imagine that mercenaries that take work against a house are not seen as mercenaries by that house, but as terrorists. People seem to have short memories of folks who work against them - their prerogative I guess.
The strict rules were put in place because people liked to game the system. When have they not liked to game the system, especially in Liberty? To give you some examples, if we didn't do a rep check, folks would try to sign up with multiple bounty boards on opposing sides of our laws. That's within their rights to do if they want to maximise their opportunities for payment, but it's not in Liberty's interests for them to attempt to claim bounties for our enemies, especially if that's within our borders. Another example is making bounty registration per ship rather than per character, because we would get people registering with their flashpoint Eagle, then claiming with a Hornviper Katana or whatever else.
Sure, its easier to be a Reaver. It's also easier to be a Zoner, who inRP left the houses because of this kind of bureaucracy restricting their lives. Alas, if we were to do away with such bureaucracy and treat everybody on a case-by-case basis, the workload would increase dramatically and we'd get called elitist/corrupt/blah when a judgment call on somebody trying to push their luck is made. You might've already noticed how paralytic LibGov is so increasing workload is not a good idea.
On the other hand, the low rewards are in place because of cash flow problems that might arise from having a more generous bounty board. It's fine for a Kusari faction to pay 10m/noob because Kusari is dead, so kills are scarce. In contrast, every day in Liberty is chaos where kills happen by the dozen. Well, maybe not so now it's easier to troll in combat than to actually fight ...
