Granted BOINC points are an average of at least 3 claimed workunits. There will also be a bit of a delay until they all are sent in and figured. We could probably dig up some more theory if you want.

Is that why they are STAYING with 5.4.11 ... more points that way?

Sekerob pretty much nailed it, the BOINC benchmark isn't perfect but it's being improved slowly. It will never be perfect though because of all the different performance levels and architechtures of computers on the market and people using different versions of BOINC.

I have an older Compaq computer with a 2.7GHz Celeron and 1.5GB RAM which benchmarks quite well but performs very poorly in HPF2 and FAAH taking nearly 24 hours per result and vastly overclaiming points compared to others in the quorum. I used to have it dedicated to GC where it did very well taking 90 minutes or less per WU and claimed very close to the other members of the quorum. The only explaination I can come up with is that the front-side bus on this computer is very slow therefore memory intensive apps like FAAH and HPF2 take a long time to complete. The CPU can perform faster but is being starved for data stored in RAM by the FSB. GC was much less memory intensive so the CPU could crunch away at full capacity.

The BOINC benchmark does not take into account FSB and RAM speed so poor performance in these areas will definitely affect points claimed vs granted.

Since I restarted I have noticed that my Intel D805's and getting 20% less than claimed consistently. The bus speed seems to be the culprit here and its time to retire the D805's from the grid.

If they get less than claimed, it just means they are claiming too much. It's noting to worry about - WCG have come up with some ingenious ways of correcting claimed credit to allow for the unreliability of the benchmark.