@ workingharder.
Dear workingharder, let’s please not lose our cool. Nobody claimed there’s no schar in learning daf yomi. The tainuh that many gedolim have against daf yomi is that it has cheapened the quality of limud haTorah in kllal Yisroel, and replaced it with hype, shtick, and superficial learning.
If you are someone who already knows how to learn then there’s no reason to spend your precious learning time skimming through a whole daf of Gemara. You should learn it properly, slowly, like a mensch, without skipping the havana and iyun- which is the ikar in learning.
Ela mai, you might be someone who isn’t well trained, and doesn’t know how to learn… Well instead of taking that little time you have out of your business day to go to a shiur that blows through a daf in an hour (which is the average daf shiur time), with little understanding, for the sake of “finishing Shas”, you should be going to a real shiur that trains you how to learn, and teaches you proper techniques in learning.
It’s not that there’s no schar in daf. There IS schar in daf, but you shouldn’t do daf for the same reason that yeshivah guys don’t have a seder for Tehillim recitations.