I've been playing around with this a bit, and I'm fairly sure it outputs the lock difficulty range that 80% of your current maxlock falls into. 80% works for every pick I tried, and included results pretty close to both the top and bottom.

I think this will give masters an easy way to check lore bonus. Still not as easy as the picking contest, but choose the right conditions and picks to lm appraise and it can be put in decently narrow bounds.