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kilobug comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong Discussion
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To be honest there is still a small impact of the rest of the team on the game : the Beaters can use the Bludgers against the seekers (so they do interact with seekers and affect their chance of catching the Snitch), and there are occasional cases in which the Quaffle point difference is high enough so the Snitch doesn't decide the game (the final of the World Cup in cannon).
But yes, since the first time I heard about the rules of Quidditch, I was "gah, that just doesn't make sense - make the Snitch worth much less, like 30, at the very least".
Hypothesis: Once upon a time, the wizarding world had no popular sport of its own, and Quidditch was more akin to aerial dueling, a one-on-one contest of skill. Then, someone realised all the various benefits/opportunities offered by popular sports (perhaps by watching the Muggle world), and added extra rules and a team element to give the crowds something to watch while the Seekers continued their long periods of boredom interspersed with sharp bursts of activity.
Quidditch today generates a massive market in terms of matches, merchandise, contracts, celebrity culture etc. - a market that benefits the economy as a whole and certain key segments of it especially. It also serves various other purposes common to team sports, such as channeling the volatile energy of young people, and creating a harmless outlet for tension between countries (harmless in theory, anyway - we don't have riot statistics for the wizarding workl).
Whoever shaped Quidditch into its modern form didn't need a balanced game - they just needed something to fill the sport-shaped gap in wizard society. Such a hypothesis would explain why Quidditch is so poor in game design terms - unbalanced scoring, disproportionately high risk of injury and matches of unpredictable length don't matter quite so much if your goal is to pander to the audience rather than make a fair test of the competitors' skills.
Canonically the situation was quite reversed, the Snitch (or rather it's predecessor, the Snidget) having been introduced to the already existing Quidditch game by a noble's quirk. I doubt this is different for MoR.
Alas. I have not read any of the follow-up works, and did not realise that they would persist in demolishing any attempt to inject credibility into the Potterverse.
I think the canon explanation is about as credible as yours, and they're both pretty good. "A typical competitive ballgame got merged with competitive bird-hunting" is a decent way it could have happened.