As for Zhou's "plan" that is precisely what he said he intended to do, a strategy I find to be immensely immoral.
From the sounds of it Zhou was the only one that had any actual day to day ops knowledge of the system. This was probably the best plan given that right now you are basically trying to put together a puzzle with a million pieces and you don't even have the box to refer too for what the fucking thing is supposed to look like.
17 year old asian kids remember everything.
His plan was to pay the most vocal people 100% of their claimed amount.
Those funds would come directly out of other users pockets.
There are x assets and y liabilities.
x < y
If people are paid 100% of their claims, necessarily those funds are coming out of other users pockets.
Not only is this strategy immoral, but it is arguably illegal.
Of course the intention there is to save face and to give back funds to people most likely to litigate.
I will have no part in anything I believe to be immoral.
A little from column A, a little from column B, take what Zhou knows / feels and combine it with your strategy and come up with something that's most right.
You guys no matter how hard you try or how much you dig, are NEVER going to come up with the info a DB snapshot would have gave you. You're never going to get actually right, so how the hell can you take the moral high ground here when the bulk of your users are suffering losses and are at the whim of your potentially flawed theories? If you have NO DATABASE there are NO RIGHT ANSWERS HERE. A pile of claims and a pile of money, you can basically make the data say whatever you want. The only conclusive evidence is tx's from within a day or two before the hack, everything else is bullshit pretty much.
edit: and even the txid's are only conclusive that the funds were deposited / withdrawn, says nothing of what actually happened to them, with the leverage they could have been tripled or lost completely in a very short period of time...