My default assumption is that most people act pretty rationally when making big decisions. Especially since these kids all have proper agents representing and advising them.
When making career decisions, everyone will make certain choices based on pros/cons. As these recruitments are now essentially a career choice, for most people salary is the most important consideration (it's the whole reason we're working in the first place), but as you say it's not an all-encompassing factor. (For us normies commute, location, boss, culture, etc. all play a role, and for college basketball players coach relationship, style of play, development track record, conference, school, location, status/prestige do too.)
If we're budgeting logically and conservatively against a cap (which is rev share allocation + expected NIL availability lumped together) and nothing I have heard from interviews with Tom Moore or from the grapevine indicates otherwise, then we can't offer a likely bench player a starter caliber bag, because then we will mismanage the cap elsewhere and run out of money for returnees or for the portal. You can't pay 6 players at starter level percentage of the cap without sacrificing elsewhere (bearing in mind that not all starters are paid the same, etc.). We expect or at least have to budget to pay Demary, Ball, Stewart, and Reibe starter caliber money, and perhaps Mullins, too. So there's probably room for another starter allocation, but not 2. You can't allocate BOTH Mingo and Landrew a starter bag unless you're extremely confident someone else on that list in addition to Mullins is going and that Mingo+Landrew would play their position. You can offer that same starter level of payment to both in a formal offer, but likely have to revise the dollar amount to the others once one of them or Samuels accepts.
If another school is offering a 5*/starter-allocation bag, and every indication from Trilly and others is that the Landrew recruitment has big/rich players coming after him hard (namely Louisville) who also have a lot of attractive items on the pros/cons list, then it's extremely unlikely we're going to get him by offering a bench-level bag. As you say, some people will take less money even acting rationally for other considerations, but very, very few people would take a "tier" less (in what would likely be measured in the hundreds of thousands different) for a similarly situated program. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but all indications is that it is unlikely to happen.
