My view is 3 kinds of points is already the maximum cognitive load we can put on people. I'd want to see a very strong justification for why a site is going to be significantly affected by not having this feature to justify overwhelming a significant number of users trying to learn the points system.

How about a switcher to switch between life-time or activity points (instead of having both on a site)? Or rather we can call it life-time points in both cases but there's an option to choose how it's defined... either as total points ever, or total points ever from content submitted.

A justification for a system like this is that the points system can be abused easily to rank up in groups when using life-time points... if two members keep sending each other points back and forth, they can rank up. Sure, a staff member can reverse the transactions (and I'll have to double check if that causes auto rank down or not), but it's still unnecessary work for staff.

Also, life-time points is often considered as a measure for user activity (groups / ranks, member info, voting power). But that's false because not all life-time points earned are from actual activity / contributions (e.g. exchanging points between members, some sites may award points for donations [though one can argue that is a form of contribution... really a preference of the admin; some admins may see that as too capitalist / classist as those who can afford to donate have an unfair way to get more points], birthday points, daily points [not points for visiting; I'd consider that a form of activity]).

Seems reasonable that we could have option(s) to determine what counts towards life-time points, good.

I'll go that route then (in the future). I think that's a good compromise. This is something I think can wait until 11.1 or later.