What happens when you miss a round? Can your "value" limit ever catch up to your actual share balance or did the pool just permanently screw you out of your prior contributions that were above your value limit?
This does explain your confusion a bit. At no time are either "value" or "earnings" reset. They both continue to accumulate. If you miss a round, you just pick up where you left off whenever you want.
But they don't accumulate at the same rate, it depends on the length of the round right? Show up late to a long round or miss it entirely and it could take a long time to "even out" again.
You're describing pool hopping in a roundabout way. Preventing it from earning more is the whole
point.
Yes, but the penalty spans rounds, whereas you can assign a penalty for a single round by decaying early shares as the round progresses. People have outages and various other legitimate reasons for downtime that could cause their prior honest work on short rounds to be unfairly discounted.
The end result is that the potential downside to honest miners is much greater with your system than with one like Slush's. In his system the potential downside only extends until the end of the round.