Hmmm, the planets were aligned well last night. I only lost 1 perk ride (a 262) and lost 133 and change for 2 kills, having paid 134 perks. Seems pretty normal to me. Death multiplier is .25, so my 2 kills would have been worth about 1 perk had I not bought the farm.
If the perk scoring is buggy, we're going to need a lot more info regarding the exact instances- perk bonus, cost, exact tally of kills, ENY of all involved, etc.
I'm not ruling anything out, just saying that I believe we're missing something here. I'll log in here shortly and sacrifice some perks, see what happens. If we can document these losses better, I'm sure we can get HTC to have a look at the setup again.