Admittedly this is more of counting chickens before they are hatched...
If we accepted property, return of royalty interest, basically tangibles assets, as part of a settlement, this would be reflected as an increase in the trust's liquidation value and therefore a (presumably) much higher unit price. The advantage to the unitholder is that he would be able to forego paying taxes on the capital gain until he decided to sell some units. Whereas with cash only, (assuming it came this year), one would be stuck with a large one-time tax bill. Otherwise, one might be able to spread it out over a couple years or more...
Although the liquidity crunch is said to be easing (depending who you listen to), as I mentioned before, including some property in the mix might also make it easier for pxd to assemble an offer, since the property portion would not require raising cash on hand.
Of course, lost revenues is pretty much a cash proposition all around. So, cash is good too. <g>
