What is scientific proof for you? I guess nothing can ever be scientific proof for some people. Are you one of those people? Just curious, I mean, what should your log have to be considered scientific proof?
In terms of generally accepted
Scientific Method, to be honest there are many things in EU (the existence of a personal lootpool being one of them) that I don't think we can currently prove. We just do not have access to enough information. And you can try to insult me as much as you want, but I am not one of "those people", this is the process upon which all of the development of the modern world has been built.
That being said, the tests we do can give very strong indications of certain things, and can support or undermine hypotheses. However they are still just hypotheses, not Laws in the scientific sense. And the interpretation of the data is subjective as illustrated by our very different interpretation of the same data.
Your view may be right, my issue is not with your belief in a personal lootpool, it's with the fact that you regard the information presented as proof. You can believe in the Man in the Moon if you want, I have no problem with that untill you tell me that the little sguiggly shape on the moon is
proof of the existence of the Man in the Moon.
To try and answer your question though, I'm not sure we have access to enough of the variables to adequately test the personal lootpool hypothesis.
Part of the problem is that the indicators you are looking for in the personal/general lootpool debate are essentially the same. Any correction towards some base avatar value can also easily be explained by the "regression toward the mean" in the general lootpool theory. The only thing I can think of which would strongly indicate a personal lootpool is the whole shooting into the air experiment. And this would have to be repeated several times on several different avatars. There would also need to a control group. But for any statistically significant answers I would think this would need to be done on at least 50 avatars. And even if there was no conclusive evidence gained, this would not
disprove the personal-lootpool theory either, because MA may just be punishing the avatars for being stupid.
The only strong indicator that I see either way is loot volatility. If there was a personal lootpool, MA would be able to exercise much greater control over your rate of return, thereby making a lot of people very happy. But as we all know, returns vary greatly over the short-term, which to me indicates a general pool. Again however, this is not proof, just an indicator, but it is enough to put me in the general lootpool camp.
The relation of loot-value to cost-to-kill is an indpendent question, which can be explained in either of the two theories.