Rewarding officials or restricting indies is all the same, how you call officials having an advantage over indies in exchange for their extra responsibilities and efforts is just a matter of opinion, of point of view. There will always be those who want things for free, who want to play and enjoy the full scale of the game without having to put in extra effort to get things. Try to reward officials more and they'll cry rivers, threatening to leave, which due to present days' paranoia of declining playerbase killing off Disco permanently will 100% result in the reversal of any change of such effect. Keep everybody rewarded equally regardless of effort put in and it just won't worth joining official factions, without them standards will eventually drop even lower (just like how it has been since I'm here) and the whole community will succumb into chaos, people one by one leaving in the meanwhile.
Basically we don't choose if or when Disco dies, only how. What path of destruction would you like to take?