@OP: Please be patient with us and ignore our grasping and snobbery. We tend to make much of ourselves and our perceived plights when we are jockeying for position, or in this case when we are attempting to get specific assignments.
Please remember that you do not exist to pander to ICs. You exist to fill assignments for clients. We exist to fill available assignments-- not to fill some self-designated number or types of assignments. There is nothing in the world that mandates this industry as a career. The numbers and types of persons who work in this industry and simultaneously in other fields amply demonstrates that is is not necessary to treat this work as a sole means of livelihood. Using this information, how shall job fees and bonuses be determined? What are the salient features of fee and bonus, regardless of any other factor?
I appreciate that you want to appeal to shoppers for the purpose of filling assignments. I appreciate that some shoppers consider this industry as their career. Power to them-- to the extent that they can remember that people who work in this field sporadically and/or part time are not necessarily inexperienced, inferior, unprofessional, or any of the other pejorative terms that have been bandied about directly and as aspersions in this forum.
There are many shoppers, and this large industry is best when a broad cross-section of humanity participates in it. How can you please some of us without alienating others of us? How can some of us participate when others have a stranglehold on most/all assignments of certain types or in certain areas?
I wish you the best of luck in this monumental task that you have undertaken. You efforts are raising philosophical and practical questions for your job, your company, and this large industry. Thank you for doing what you are doing, which considers MSCs, clients, and shoppers.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. - Lao-Tzu