It seems to me that every poster who has contributed to this thread agrees that the concept of deciding a competition by following ISU guidelines and adding up points is so far from any kind of reality that we have to ask, is it really worth it to keep up the pretense?
I don't think we do have that kind of agreement.
BladesofPassion seems to want the technical side of the marking to be even more micromanaged than is currently the case. And also to allow the jduges to manipulate the PCS to intentionally override the technical scores.
You and some others seem to be arguing that we should just go back to letting judges rank the skaters in whatever order they want based on subjective holistic perceptions of the programs with no documentation of the reasons.
We don't yet have a system that can objectively quantify technical content and also accurately measure subjective assessments of quality and combine both those metrics in a meaninful way. There certainly hasn't been one presented in this thread.
Is it worth trying? And finetuning whatever we come up with to fix any significant problems that become apparent?
Should we give up and decide that a system designed for scoring the accuracy of circles and for ranking the content and quality of programs based on edges punctuated with single jumps and other highlight moves is the fairest system possible? Even though and that system was notoriously prone to accusations of bias and politics that were sometimes actually true (and the nature of way the scores were presented encouraged conspiracy theories even when there nothing but the theorists' imaginations to support them)?
Should we decide that what many fans like about skating is subjective appreciation that the aesthetic qualities of the best performances, so the scoring system and rules should be designed to privilege aesthetic appeal over technique?
Or should we appeal instead to those who accuse skating of not being a "real sport" by emphasizing the quantitatable objective aspects and minimizing the impact of the subjective qualitative ones?
Should we agree that there will never be a fair comprehensive way to determine skating results, but the most fun part of following the sport is complaining about whatever the current official rules are? If so, maybe we shouldn't suggest any good changes -- because then if the ISU does adopt them, we'd just have to start complaining about our own ideas on the principle that the status quo by definition is always wrong.