Why do players gush over rake back when the casino providing rake back could simply not charge the rake associated with rake back?

The only aspect I like about rakeback; is that it kind of acts like a savings account while you play. You don't use those funds when you buy in, which over time results in massive 'savings' that are waiting to be collected.

Am I missing something? Are you for or against rakeback?

Rake back rewards players with more volume more than it does casual players. Sure, it would be better if the rake were lower. But with higher rake plus rake back, regulars effectively pay lower rake while recs who don’t play much pay effectively higher rake, obviously if you are a pro grinder you will welcome the rakeback as it benefits you more than it does casual players.

It’s a similar reason to why higher income earners favor tax cuts more than lower income earners do. Higher income earners pay more taxes so they naturally benefit more when taxes are cut. Similarly grinders pay more rake, so they benefit more than recs from rakeback.

Well, as you say, that would be simpler, fairer, and cheaper for everyone. But there's certain people stuck in a 2008 mentality whereby through nitbotting 85 tables at the same time they feel entitled to get an extra 2% who just can't move on to poker in 2024

Rakeback is a peculiar institution.

The roots of rakeback are in online poker site marketing. Someone had the bright idea to offer to affiliates -- people who were tasked with recruiting new players -- a percentage of the site's earn from those players as a sort of royalty. (Some of you may be old enough to remember the unending tsunami of email and blog-comment spam from unimaginative affiliates in the early oughts.) Some imaginative affiliates had the clever idea that if they gave some of that royalty to the players, they would be incentivized to play more and generate more affiliate royalties. The royalties rebated to the players in this setup came to be known as rakeback.

Online regs soon learned that it was much better to sign up for a site through an affiliate who paid rakeback than directly with the site. The rakeback that affiliates offered soon converged towards respectable rates, typically 27% of MGR.

Online operators got wise to this and implemented frequent-player programs that offered either true rakeback or its equivalent.

In the end, rakeback functions as a form of price discrimination. The dumb money, the suckers, just play online and pay the full amount of rake. Smart money, though, signs up for rakeback, either through getting their account through an affiliate or by jumping through the hoops of the frequent-player program. As anyone who has taken Econ 101 can tell you, price discrimination is a way of extracting more money out of a market than setting a single price. This is why operators are disincentivized from simply cutting rake; by keeping rake high and offering rakeback to those who care, they get to extract more money from the players who don't.