So are we crediting Mary Roberts Rinehart for Batman and Victor Hugo for The Joker?

Just checking.

Stan was paid millions, not for the characters, but to be the face of Marvel, as he had been, since the 60s.  Stan was used to schmooze with licensors and producers, to get media properties done.  Stan was paid for what he did best:  promote Marvel.  Stan was the name in every comic and on the lecture circuit and the talk shows, before he ever appeared in a Marvel-based tv show or movie.

To the outside world, Stan Lee WAS Marvel.

That was why he was paid millions.

Now, if you want to argue that some of those millions were to keep him from being a friendly witness in any lawsuits from people like Kirby and Ditko, or others, then I will say, yes, he was paid millions to stay with the company's POV.

Along these lines, in Joe Simon's memoir, he talked of trying to exercise his claim to Captain America; but, ironically, it was Kirby  siding with Marvel that killed his chances and made him give up any claim of ownership.  That ended up biting Kirby in the tuchus, when his family tried to go after Marvel, as he had signed away any rights to Captain America.  Simon had always maintained copyright on their creations, which is why Spyman, Lancelot Strong and the Fly belonged to them and not Harvey Comics or Archie Comics.

I find this the better analogy.

The credit began "produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby." How they broke that down into page rate, I don't know. 

That's not what I would conclude from that evidence. I think it more strongly supports Kirby's contentions that he was writing the stories mostly independently, delivering them with his margin notes explaining to Stan what was happening, and Stan would dialog them starting with Kirby's plotted and drawn stories. It's not that Stan was dissatisfied with how Kirby had rendered the plot Stan had given Kirby, it was that Stan hadn't told Kirby what to draw but was then rejecting the plot that Kirby had created and drawn.

That's the kind of thing that would lead to a very rotten working situation for Kirby. He was expected to plot and draw a story with minimal or zero direction, at the risk of what he spent all that time on being rejected and his having to still meet deadlines by supplying a different story, fully penciled...and he doesn't even get the pages back?! (And this also goes to the question of whether this really was "work for hire"; if my work needs revision, I should still get paid for the work done in the first place, they can't just tell me "we're not paying you for what you did on company time this week." Unless I'm not really a company employee and I'm taking the risk of independently creating material and offering it on the chance that they're willing to buy it from me.) We know of at least one incident where Kirby's story was rejected on the spot, and he ripped pages in half and threw them in the trash, that being an unused Hulk story rescued from the garbage by Larry Leiber. Nothing similar to the story being told in those pages ever appeared in HULK. If it was a plot Lee had directed Jack to draw, one would expect the story to be redone. Or if Lee had provided a plot that just didn't work, then Jack should have been paid something for dutifully rendering what he'd been assigned, even if Lee decided against it once he saw the pages. The only conclusion I can draw is that in this instance, at least, Stan simply decided the story was no good after Jack had come up with it and written it the only way he wrote: in pencils on the art board.

If Lee did have a stack of rejected pages, that means Kirby would do his job, deliver the work, and later be informed that he had to start over, and he wouldn't be paid for the work he put in. If you're going to operate that way, a good editor should be giving ongoing direction to ensure that time wasn't wasted on non-viable work, not saying "bring me a fully plotted and fully drawn story, and I'll see if I like it once you're done."

I'm not sure I follow what my leap is, unless you thought I meant that he was frequently turning in complete 20+ page stories that were rejected, which wasn't what I was meant to suggest (although I can see where my wording might have led someone to that interpretation). If there were indeed "stacks of rejected pages", though, it would have added up to a considerable amount of wasted effort on Kirby's part, that he was apparently not compensated for. And we can deduce that, as in the case of the Hulk story, there were several instances where at least significant portions of what Kirby submitted were chucked. For instance, the original Silver Surfer/Galactus trilogy appears to have been cobbled together by splitting several more cohesive stories, implying that some portions of surrounding stories were deleted: we get half of the Inhumans wrap-up, then half of the first Galactus story, then a full Galactus story, then another half of a Galactus story awkwardly combined with the start of a "Johnny goes to college" story. Throughout that arc, we can see a few instances of classic Kirby "final panel" scenes that fall in the middle of the printed issue, leading me to guess that a big piece of the Inhumans story was thrown out and the in-progress Galactus story was inserted ahead of schedule. And of course, the Galactus saga is the prime example where Lee is on record implying that Kirby was free-wheeling, as the Surfer, who is the focus of the first installment, came as a complete surprise to him.

To confirm that I consider this a positive and productive discussion, I will admit that exploring this subject has me softening my opinions of Lee's contributions to the collaboration, although I continue to prefer Jack's own scripting to Lee's, and I think Jack's language, quirky and occasionally awkward though it could be, was more evocative and meaningful than Lee's breezier, playful, and more easily digested wordings.