I was thinking about this on my drive to work. I think you need to narrow down the scope of your article, and instead of offering advice and what basically amounts to encouraging people to embrace "indie ideals" take your article in the direction of offering creative ideas for different payment schemes for indie games.
You yourself said you are more the creative/visionary type, so I think this would be a much better route. Besides, if you're article is simply offering ideas and suggestions, you don't need "credentials" per se for the article to have worth. I think the key thing is to offer suggestions like you did above, utilizing real world examples - i.e. the wings in furcadia, dragon amulets in DragonFable, etc - but also create unique pay-schemes for the indie games that don't traditionally employ such methods. Come up with and elaborate on some unique pay scheme for a Match-3 or a Betty's Beer Bar type game.
You aren't going to convince the cloners to stop cloning with one simple article - or, more likely, with any article - so why waste your breath trying? Instead, just offer ideas and those who are willing to take a bit of a risk and innovate will see them and perhaps try them.
You yourself said you are more the creative/visionary type, so I think this would be a much better route. Besides, if you're article is simply offering ideas and suggestions, you don't need "credentials" per se for the article to have worth. I think the key thing is to offer suggestions like you did above, utilizing real world examples - i.e. the wings in furcadia, dragon amulets in DragonFable, etc - but also create unique pay-schemes for the indie games that don't traditionally employ such methods. Come up with and elaborate on some unique pay scheme for a Match-3 or a Betty's Beer Bar type game.
You aren't going to convince the cloners to stop cloning with one simple article - or, more likely, with any article - so why waste your breath trying? Instead, just offer ideas and those who are willing to take a bit of a risk and innovate will see them and perhaps try them.