But also importantly the government of the residents' country is about 39% ($78) richer, if say the participants are honest in reporting this and the country is the UK and the participants are people like you and me in the tech industry who frequent HN and would think to do something like this.

I might disagree with this. To me, the joy of the books was developing a deep understanding of the societies and their norms. This felt almost entirely missing from the movies, which focused more on events. This is fine--they're different mediums, after all, but the second movie in particular left me a little disappointed.

I think this is kind of my point -- there's no way to develop that level of nuance in a movie. The options are to take way more time (see Silo), to do a crappy job (see... almost every 2 - 3 hour movie), or to instead change the goal: Don't have the viewer "develop… a deep understanding", but down-select to those viewers who already respect the work and have that deep understanding, and instead focus on showing them the society and its norms. Do what movies are great at -- make a story come to life -- and make the viewer/reader do the work of knowing the background, knowing what they're seeing, knowing what's important.