I agree that it appears that the ultimate goal is to say that 1 point is worth 1/2 cent. There may be some values above that for a while. But that sure looks like where we are headed. Two comments about that:

First, the thread focuses on the "burn" side, but not the "earn" side. On a $100 room at an ES, DT, or Hilton today, booked with the free AmEx, a Diamond earns 6,000 points ($30 @ 1/2 cent per point). That's about a 30% rebate (not factoring in taxes, but also not factoring in that there's no resort fees or taxes on award stays). What each person has to decide is whether that's good enough. I think it is for me, but YMMV. (For example, I don't have enough stays in big cities to be top tier in Hyatt or SPG, and my overall nights per year are too low for top tier at Marriott.)

Second, my real fear isn't what they've done up to now, but what's going to happen in the future. Southwest went to a revenue based award system years ago. The lessons that I drew from that are that you use your points as quickly as you can (since you always get the same amount per point, there's no reason to save points), and that it is really easy to devalue revenue based award redemption systems. Southwest started at 70 points per dollar when redeeming. I think it's now up to 78 points. Which, of course, takes you back to the part about redeeming as quickly as you can.