@Livingincanadaafter19yearsinlondon, I'm not sure which parts of your post are addressed to me, but I assume some is as you quoted my post.
FWIW, what I would like to see is a fairer distribution so that pensioners who have worked get a decent standard of living, but I would restrict universal pensions to those who either paid in the right number of years or had good reason for not doing so. Those reasons would include things like illness, disability or caring responsibilities (for a disabled person or someone otherwise unable to care for themselves, not decades of looking after your own children and house).
Anyone with no income at retirement age should get a household means-tested pension, so someone who has been 'supported' by a partner or spouse in their working years can continue to do so in retirement, or get UC. A pension should be a reward for years of work, not a prize for reaching retirement age.
I don't think that people who have worked for decades should only have a subsistence standard of living, and I'm bored with the venom that is spat at older people by posters, bots and sections of the media. Lazy stereotypes about millionaires with houses worth 100 times what they cost ignore little things like class, sex and geographical location, and show no understanding of how life was different (particularly for women) when today's pensioners were young.
It's true that most people don't pay in as much as they get out, but that's because for a lot of people wages are rubbish, and have always been so for large sections of the population. The SP should take that into account, and pay according to the number, not the value of contributions, as those on higher incomes have more to invest in occupational or private pensions, and get higher rates of tax relief when they do so. It's hardly fair to penalise people for having a badly paid job even after they've retired.
At the same time, it makes no sense to penalise those who have paid into other pensions by means-testing their whole income. Pensions are taxed, so they pay in that way, in any case. Someone with an occupational pension who loses a SP will pay a lot less tax than they do now, so the savings won't be as high as face value might suggest, and it would be cruel to upend people's retirement plans yet again. Women have already had between 6 and 10 years added to their pension age, and that impacts on couples as well as on single women. It may be 'fair', but for the people concerned it has massively interfered with their plans for older age, and slashing their incomes by £11k would be unconscionable, as would forcing people onto the sort of accountability that being on means-tested benefits brings.
Wealthier pensioners tend to be those born before the early 50s anyway, as they had access to SERPS in their own right, and could inherit SERPS from their husbands. My mother, who only worked for about 7 years between my brother reaching 13 and her retirement in her early 50s, gets nearly twice the full new SP because of those legacy perks and the home responsibilities payments she got for three children until the youngest was 16. The New SP is single tier, so most people on here will get a flat rate, regardless of what we paid in, and we won't inherit if we are widowed. Gradually, more and more people will be on the single tier pension as the older generations die, which will reduce costs naturally.