if the masternode payment problem can allegedly be fixed without a hard fork, why is evan considering hard forking for the payments again? can someone explain the rationale here
Yes... alternate system involves a system in which greedy miners won't be so greedy - kind of semi voluntarily running a client which pays the nodes.
Given the past record of people mining DRK (they were sitting at coinmine for extended periods despite >51% hashrate back in March) that would present problems implementing and would be the wrong way of doing it really. It's a hack that will be hacked for selfish gain. Better do it the right way, after finding the bugs and eliminating them (or using a different mechanism).