I think that is the key question. Is the USFSA like the owner of a team, who hires a coach to run it, with the players as employees (unpaid, in the case of college sports)? Or is it a regulatory body that oversees fair and even-handed competition for all participating athletes?
I think with respect to running a
national championships (and other USFS-sponsored events that determine who qualifies for for Nationals and determines national champions for other test levels/disciplines/competition tracks), it is a regulatory body that oversees fair and even-handed competition for all participating in those events: how skaters are scored within the rules, which directly affects their final placements and the medals earned if any.
The other rewards that skaters may receive as a result of their placements at USFS championships are not part of "fair and even-handed competition" within the event. For example, the event officials and even the federation leadership officials may have no say whatsoever in which skaters get hired to appear in corporate sponsor ads on the strength of their national results, or in who gets honored by a corporate or individual sponsor offering a prize of a car or trophy or $1,000 check for skaters who earn the most perfect scores or the highest total PCS or the most ratified quads or a specific non-medal placement in a specific event, or who had the "best performance" in each discipline by a vote of Professional Skaters Association members.
Assignments to
international events fall somewhere in between. For that purpose, I think USFS does serve a purpose more similar to managing a team to send out to competition against other federations.
The number of places available at ISU championships or on the JGP, for example, depend on factors beyond USFS's control; the placements of last year's entrants are the determining factor, but those placements depend on how other countries' skaters performed and how the international judges scored them all.
USFS also has little control over whether skaters qualify for international events in terms of age eligibility, citizenship for the Olympics, or minimum technical scores. (In other countries, the national Olympic committees may have additional requirements that override the specific sports federations -- that hasn't been an issue in the US, at least not for figure skating.) There will be times that skaters who place high enough at Nationals to earn an "automatic" spot won't be able to make use of that spot because they don't meet outside criteria. So the automatic qualification can't always be automatic.
As mentioned above, there will also be times when dominant skaters have to miss Nationals, or have a documented minor health or equipment emergency
at Nationals that prevents them from finishing the event or prevents them from skating at their usual standard but that isn't likely to affect their performance a month or two later.
In some cases, it may be necessary to make team assignments provisionally, contingent on, e.g., demonstrating recovery from injury or on earning ISU-mandated minimum technical scores at an intervening international event.
And if Nationals results automatically lead to specific international assignments, that increases the incentive for officials to compromise the integrity of this national event in order to achieve the team they would like to see. This was more of a problem under 6.0 but it could still be an issue.
So I think it does make sense to include some flexibility in the team selections rather than automatically following Nationals results.
However, there is also value in rewarding the ability to deliver when it counts, and making Nationals "count" in that way.
What if the selection criteria listed Nationals results as Tier 1 and most-recent GPF/Worlds results as Tier 2? (Or 1A and 1B?) So it's possible for the selection committee to deviate from strict Nationals finish when necessary, but the rules/guidelines encourage following Nationals results as much as possible rather than second guessing?
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