Let me be clear here that I'm "asking for clarification" as opposed to "disagreeing with JonNYC who clearly knows waaaay more about this subject than me."

Jon, are you using "average" here in a precise sense (and if so did you mean "mean" or "median")? Or are you just saying "that's not high enough that you'll normally beat everybody" or something? My prior would be that EQD follows a power law, that is to say the number of people hitting each higher dollar diminishes exponentially. Given we figure AA set the EQD bar (12k) in such a place as to cull a significant amount of long-cheap flyers, I would expect 20k to be way above the median spend for an EXP. That fits with my experience as well (usually run around 17k rolling, 82% success rate this year). Do we have any numbers for what EXPs spend?