The funny thing is porn stars DO get paid very well ($2000-3000 for an hour or so of work). Well, the female ones anyway. The male porn stars get something like $600.
Generally, a female porn actress will make less than $1,000 for a standard scene and a few $100 more if it includes anal. Male porn actors make around $200-300 for a scene.
Also, it's not "an hour or so of work". A scene can take up to 6 hours to shoot, and a full day never includes more than two or three scenes. There's also time spent pre- and post-shoot.
Of course, the famous actor will make more, but just as in every other industry, there are very few of them compared to the total.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the rates (and it does seem like they've dropped a lot lately after looking into it), but I'm either grossly misremembering or we paid a premium for our talent. I believe it was the latter, because the company definitely liked to spend money.
The worst part is that it's a lot of work to find constant work unless you have a really good manager or you're famous. Sure, the hours are short, but I found that having stable hours and not having to live shoot pay check to shoot pay check is preferable, even if it's a considerably lower hourly wage.
(Much like contract programming work!)
This is why individual contractors charging $100-200 an hour are not actually making $250-500k a year.
Edit: Interestingly, whereas open-source code expands the market (and rates) for programmers, open porn destroys the market for porn stars...
Has this been proven?