Philosophical question here, and I'm trying to leave out the whole flame-bait conversation that already happened between Unity players and some players on Chaos about the fairness of tokens for players of one shard vs. another. Lets look at this from the perspective only of players from Unity:
When Unity shut down, many of the European players came to one of the US shards, and have been waiting for plot reclamations to start up again. Many others came to US shards when VI took over. All before character transfers have been enabled.
How is it fair to those players from your own community to hand out plot or lair tokens when they have been gathering cash for the day when plot reclaim happens, to just hand out tokens to the remainder of that community? Keep in mind that plot tokens are an "I win" button in any plot auction... they are not "coin value" in the regular auction process. So you are really asking for the ability to trump any coin bid in the auction. Shouldn't the players from your own community who have been playing and gathering coin on the US servers have a better chance at a lair bid because they have shown dedication to the game as a whole?
In my opinion, it belittles their commitment to the game and the communities that you are joining when you ask to be given a plot or lair token, even if they also get one. You all had the opportunity to come start characters on the live server, start to gather cash, learn the community, and join guilds with old friends and new.
Now, if plot reclamation happened before the transfers, I'd agree that you have a great deal to yell about. But all of your beloved main characters and alts from Unity, their gear, all the items stored on your plots or in your lairs (including stacks of resources or novians you had stored), and all your coinage (which is part of your inventory despite fear-mongering in this thread to the contrary) are being tranferred to a US shard of your choice.
The only proposal I've hear in this thread so far that I'd support, without a great deal of convincing, is that plot owners might be given the sale price set on the plot when Unity shut down as extra cash. That would let them participate fairly in the plot reclamation and auction process.
As far as novians, the novians that you get back when deconstructing a structure are based on how many resources you put into the structure, not how many resources it would currently take to make that structure. So for lairs, which recently had their construction materials drastically reduced (except for halls), you'd be getting back an overabundance of novians, which the devs *may* have felt was worse than not returning novians. I can't speak for their decision making process, but can offer a possible line of thought.
Finally, in case anyone reading this thread hasn't been paying attention to the other forums, please note that my title of Emissary does not mean I am a developer, or even an unpaid intern. I am a player who has elected to help convey opinions of players expressed in-game or on non-VI forums to the developers, and bring answers back to the those players if given permission. Nothing said above represents official policy, only my own opinions.