Moving compensation away from value-added-to-company and towards likability seems misguided. Pay seems like it's been correlated to how much value a person adds to a company at a given time. I don't really see how this is a positive thing at all. If I'm a developer, I don't want to have to make decisions on how much my peers should get paid. Jamie just had a baby, but Jerry's wife just lost her job, and such-and-such had a medical emergency, sounds like a hassle to have to think about with respect to how much a person should be paid.

At the end of the day, salary is a distraction. At least personally I prefer just to have one person to deal with about it and not a room full, and once it's settled, it's not something that I think about. I also don't want the responsibility of having to listen to coworkers present their cases for more money. I want my relationship with my peers to be purely based on work, not decisions about their compensation.