For a project like land it works to have a project payment. But what do you do when he works on 20 tiny things in the game in-between huge projects?
I think for cryptomancer, hourly pay instead of a monthly salary may work better, since he has long periods of traveling and vacation when he works much less, and from how he was described over time, he is very detailed in his reports and good with estimates (unlike many devs).
Regarding cheaper devs, they exist, for sure. But we tend to want great results yesterday, and for that, new employees or contractors only lengthen the duration of development (they need to get up to speed, understand the code, get some easier work first, etc.) and potentially drop the quality standards. You can't hire someone today, no matter how experienced, and tomorrow (or even in a month) they start coding land. It's a lengthy process, which should be attempted at some point, when they start expanding again (hopefully). Let's also account for the language barrier in some cases, where a great coder can't understand well enough the requests, and they either need more supervision or someone needs to make sure they understood what they were asked to do.