Re RELATIVELY SPEAKING: knowing how leveraged the company that produced and distributed the show was (the executive producer Mitch Gutkowski was also personally cutting most of the major market deals with stations) and how poor the first few weeks of ratings were relative to expectaions from advertisers, my educated guess is that his investors mandated budget cuts whereever possible, no matter how minor, just to try and stop the bleeding. Taking away the potential of even modest prizes from later episodes probably cut a few thousand out of their minus column.
Relative to some other syndie efforts in that era, RS at least tried to look like a first-rate daytime show at the outset, even though way too many stations were running it pre-dawn. Looking back on it now, had this been attempted a decade or so earlier, it might have had a shot.
