I'm not sure what you need excess wealth for as a knight. Sending it to your family?
Being a landed lord on the other hand opens a lot of new venues for you even if your income suffers. Then again, lords of poorer provinces always receive additional funding from the metropolis.
So why be a knight if you can become a lord? If you incentivise lords to hoard knights instead of incentivising knights to maintain knightly status, you are basically screwing knights over.
I would hate to see a situation where a Duke refuses to land his knight just because he wants to maximize his profit even if there are lordless regions available.
On the other hand, if knights have real incentives to choose knightly status over lordship (like being able to do some fun stuff lords aren't able to do), lords themselves won't even need additional encouragement.
Why would a knight want excess wealth? Training at the academy, developing a stronger unit, buying magic items, sending it home. Lots of reasons. Simply put, if you have more gold you can do more stuff and I am certain that income is a serious consideration for people when choosing estates/lordships. It is not always the case, but Lordships are not always a clear step up and not every knight will rush into every lordship. Honestly, I think that lordship should be sought after and that the game has a fairly decent balance as it is. At the same time, this is not really core to this discussion in my opinion.
Also, it is not about incentivising Lords to hoard knights. It is about making it so the act of taking on a knight does don't hurt he lord financially and financially benefits everyone in the region, knight or lord, in some small way. At the same time, I see no reason why it would be a bad thing for a lord to value their knights.
I agree we should try to find more ways to make being a knight more fun. I do not, however, see how the dev's proposed goals are bad for the game or prevents changes that would make the game more fun for knights. I admit that my suggested implementation might not be perfect. I must be missing something here...
