This is partly a reply to Anton's article on self-picking which became way too long to be a comment and partly my views on the debate on self-picking.

Anton Kösters argues that because of the rewards for self-picking the hand,
MCR becomes more of an offensive game. This is certainly the case,
but the bonus points for winning the hand contribute to this as
well, and I will argue that they contribute to it in a way that can
be exploited by a skilled player, whereas the reward for self-drawn
hands tends to be random.

Certainly, there are times where you might want to not take a
discard and wait, hoping to self-pick the tile. But most of the
times people do this, it is because they need the extra points
because they are behind (often because someone else was lucky enough
to self-pick), and you can even have a situation where it is the
last hand of a game and the player in second place will only want to
take his hand on a self-drawn tile, since even taking it from the
player in first place will not award enough points to take the lead.
I know that there are situations where you want to self-pick the
hand simply because you have so many chances to self-pick it and it
has a good value, but this does not happen very often.

All this makes players play less defensively to the extent that
playing defensively is rarely a good idea, unless it can be done
without hindering your own hand. For instance, with the current
rules, in many situations you would prefer to feed someone a hand
rather than have them self-pick it, which means that playing
defensively against the hand loses value since playing defensively
increases the chance that someone self-picks.

Now, MCR is an offensive game, and that should not be changed (if we
wanted to play a very defensive game, we would play Riichi), but
just like you cannot win a game of Riichi by folding every hand, it
should not be a viable strategy in the long run to go for every hand
in MCR, at least not all the way to the end, since being able to
read what your opponents are going for is certainly something that
takes skill, and avoiding those tiles while still maintaining the
offensive takes yet more. These are skills I would like MCR to
reward more, and making self-picked hand worth the same as those
taken from discards is a way to do so. (I am not objecting to the
extra points gained for self-pick and fully concealed hand, since
these can be exploited to have a temporary wait where you have to
self.pick. But if that wait cannot be improved in a way that allows
you to take the hand on a discard, you have failed to make a good
hand, and you should not be rewarded extra when you then self-pick
it).

Well, those were my two cents on the subject. I have been meaning to
write something for a while, and I hope this did not become too
confusing to read.