I'm not sure that a linearly-proportional reward is the right way to approach this sort of comparison.
Consider for example % experience boosts, and comparison to Learning. For 13 runes, you get 10%. For the next 26 runes, you get another 10%.
Or consider Prayer, which gives you 3% for 10, another 4% for the next 12, and another 3% for the 14 after that.
Or consider Glory, which will give 100 leadership for the first 7, 250 more for the next 9, and 350 more for the next 11 after that.
Or you can consider resistance, value based on stoneskin I. Resistance suddenly looks more valuable: 2.8 runes per I believe.
There are four ways I see of dealing with this sort of problem. The first it to throw up your hands and declare it a lost cause. The second is to simply choose to always use either the worst, best or some sort of average value. The third is to make it a function of domains - for resistance that is less than 20%, use the stoneskin I result; for resistance between 20 and 30, use stoneskin II result, etc. The third is to try and actually fit some sort of function to these varying results. Problem is any of these solutions other than the "throw up your hands" one takes a fair amount of work.
Finally, for the +gold items... I think if you're reasonably careful you'll end up with surplus gold in this game, so your primary expense becomes buying runes. So this is actually a case where you *can* make a direct, hard to dispute comparison between the two. Figure 2.5 million gold from fights in this game (plus another 1.5 million from assorted chests, quests, random piles lying around, etc.). Then 1% more gold after combat is 25,000 more gold over the course of the game. Even valuing one rune at only 100,000 gold (which is really the bare minimum), +gold becomes worth only 0.25 runes per percent. At the (still low) value of 250k, +gold is worth only 0.1 runes per percent.
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