Agreed. The sad part is that some of this fits exactly what many opponents to QI said would happen when QI first started. Readers want to support the authors and translators whenever possible, but marketing and payment expectations are significantly different between western and eastern countries.
A subscription seems like a fair way to balance everyone's needs, but they just have to find the right price to make it practical. That doesn't always mean more expensive though. My guess is that this experiment primarily only pulled in the people that were already buying SS due to the high subscription cost they used. That means they were probably taking a very significant loss in income compared to what they made before the subscription process started. If the cost is low enough to pull in a lot more readers that are relying on free SS, however, then they could tap into a large pool of readers. That should allow QI to make a lot more money than they did with this past subscription experiment.
I haven't seen any numbers to really know the prices needed to make any of this work, but I would love to see a tiered system established. For example, it could be something like this:
The Basic level has a very low cost ($5 - $10 a month?), and you pick 5 or so novels every week or month to have free reading rights for those novels during that time frame. You still get free SS from daily tasks to use for other novels or for donations.
The Normal level is moderately priced ($15 a month?), and you get unlimited access to novel chapters. This is basically what they just tried to do, but it's cheaper. To help save on costs, free SS from daily tasks are now converted to extra experience or something without a monetary value.
The Fan level gets more expensive ($20 a month?). Everything is just like normal access except you get 2 new additions. You get a unique tag showing your subscription level when commenting, and you also regularly get a support token you can donate to an author/translator of your choice for them to get something extra (similar to SS donations).
The Enthusiast level costs a bit more ($30 a month?), and it takes the Fan level a step further by giving you more support tokens to donate to the authors/translators of your choice. At the same time, the tag that shows up with your comments needs to be cooler than the one for Fan level.
* The Supporter level is for high rollers ($50 a month?), and it is just like the Enthusiast and fan levels, but you get more support tokens to donate. The tag displayed also needs to be better than any of the others, and maybe there should be an achievement as a true supporter.
This subscription model would allow lower prices to entice those not willing to buy SS due to the low return on cheap SS investment. At the same time, it provides incentives and recognition for those with spare money to provide extra support for the authors/translators as well as their ability to subsidize some of the lower cost subscriptions. This ultimately allows more novels to be read which creates more enthusiasm and excitement for QI, and that eventually feeds into more subscriptions. It could potentially be a win-win for everyone.