Option 1: S/A are a rarity
Shiny and albino chances are low enough that you might get one special sparkle a day even with full boosts. S/A prices are consistently high because each one has to pay for roughly one day of charms and HM (more if buyers are hard to find). Bartering becomes more common as it's less feasible for people to hunt things for themselves. Hardly anyone DPs anything because it's simply not financially worth it, and deltas are correspondingly more expensive.
Option 2: S/A are a commodity
Full boosts net you around 3-4 specials per day. S/A are dirt cheap and easy to sell in bulk to high buyers, who generously feed them all to Sally for DP. The reward gained from DP is proportional to the investment, so there's good incentive to use it, both for newer players and veterans with large hoards, so those large hoards get liquidated. S/A becomes a stepping stone and DP (be it deltas, or whatever other system supplements it) becomes the new endgame.
This. Personally, I don't like at all option 1, and here's why.
I'm no economist, but what I imagine from there is that prices will inevitably increase, the rarer the specials the higher the price.
This will also bring DP and Deltas to increase in price, since the only viable source for DP is conversion (anonymous clicks are not a reliable source, more like a little bonus. It would've been back in the days of forums where people begged for click in signatures, but those days are long gone). So
everything that can be collected here gets more expensive, so even if someone only wants to play for Deltan Pokémon (like me) and doesn't really care if the market is oversaturated, has to suffer the raise in price of pretty much everything, because then every boost will increase in price since the only way to get a kinda nice income would be to use ALL boost EVERY DAY. This will only discourage those who can't afford to play for hours every day.
In the games, for instance the latest that came out, Legends Arceus
Potential Arceus spoiler
You can't compare the shiny odds of that game, which are already nice per se, to those of a game that's 1) fundamentally different in structure (not in a negative way, it's a fact) and 2) is in perpetual motion so one can't just complete the Dex and go hunting, because every three months there are two new eggs plus all the byproducts of MCWs and such.
Making everything rare I think will only keep players away in the long run. Those who play a bit everyday would not be motivateed to do so since the rewards to do it would be nonexistant. And little by little, even "big players" will have no one to buy their earned specials.
No, I think the option 2 is the more viable one, just like many said, adding more stuff to do with DP or in general with the surplus of shiny and albinos.
I liked Hucklberri's idea of a "global" donation bar. What about you can either donate the special for DP OR donate it to the global bar (value to be calculated), and when it's full it could be like a second MCW, opening more bonuses at once? Of course, just like the other bonuses' bars, the number shall be adjusted so it doesn't come too often, but not so rarely that makes donating not worth it in favor of just getting DP.
By the way, making DP an official currency doesn't seem so bad (making it tradable then).
Because the problem in the end were not the special odds, were they? It's the saturation of special's marker, isn't it? So, adding more stuff to do with that surplus seems the more reasonable thing to do.
I know Niet, who's really great, will find something cool to fix this mess <3
