Hello
great post.
- I agree that Solend is getting a disproportionate share of the incentives at the moment.
- I think the pool might not be underutilized: mSOL is skewed to be a better collaral. I believe the play is depositing the asset the that appreciates with time and borrow a stable or other low volatility asset against it.
- I think the lack of high competition is because of Solend being ahead of the game. Other protocols either fail to see the value proposition (and had not participated in Marinade’s Token Exchange while Solend together with Port, Friktion and Raydium had), failed to engage their communities, or generally have their limited attention elsewhere.
This was debated from the original gauges proposal and got cut due to the technical complexity of implementing it. While from cost effectivity perspective this backstop makes sense, it would result into a compensation mechanism for protocols that stay passive. I believe the correct solution lies in decreasing the overall incentives (easy to implement) and trying to engage other protocols to participate (very hard 
).
This is of course the correct approach that did not have infrastructure support at the time.
I’d like to invite you to liquidity-gauges in Discord where weekly incentives votes are debated.