I think you are seeing things through your own lense. Marsak might have had sentiment on the crowd on his side, but he also skated decently with better tech than most. Kim was scored fairly. Gumennik often falls and underrotates even when he doesn't go for Malinin-Chen style load in some Saransk. And, if the judges put a skater from Taipei ahead, it was justified by his cleaner skate and potentially longer career ahead of him.
I have nothing against Marsak or Li. They both skated well and were decently scored. Good for them. Sad for Davide not being rewarded for his artistry. This is the usual in figure skating. Unless a skater is from a strong federation and has built up a long reputation of high profile artistic excellence, like Jason Brown, the judging is most likely not going to be in that skater's favor if sans quad(s) they do not at least have a reliable 3‐axel. Lack of a 3-axel is what has hampered Davide's high-scoring ability in his career.
I did not see Davide's previous competition, so I only learned from Beijing pre-event chatter that Davide recently landed the 3-axel. I was surprised to not see Davide perform it in Beijing, as it sounded as if he had finally mastered it. I guess not under pressure. It's really too bad Davide wasn't rewarded more on pcs, but lacking a quad and a 3-axel doesn't go down well for men in this sport, no matter how accomplished and beautiful their skating is. Davide was not on my radar nor in my predictions for top five. I was pleasantly surprised by Davide's gorgeous, well-executed sp, so I was rooting for him in the fp. But as I said after the sp, I felt that Kim and Davide would be vulnerable to quadsters with clean skates in the fp, while I expected the top three to prevail. Meltdowns in the fp due to pressure were not on my Bingo card for Carrillo and Pitot, as they both had fairly good sp leads and they had seemed confident.
In any case, as I emphasized previously, I was struck by GOE for Kim being so noticeably held back, from the first jump onward. Kim's quad was well-executed. As well-executed a quad as Kim landed always receives some GOE, even if meager. That was eye-opening for me, in addition to the low GOE for Kim throughout his fp. Plus, how Ted and Mark seemed to go out of their way to overly critique Kim's jump technique, while commenting in a more positive way about Marsak's messier looking technique, during his skate. Ted & Mark clearly framed Kim's skating skills and jump technique as lesser than, while framing Kyrylov's as 'different'. Plus, the crowd's reception of Kim's inspired, clean performance was very lukewarm. Sure that can happen with some crowds, but all of these observations are fairly obvious. I have found Kim to generally be a strong and consistent skater, and I enjoy watching him when he's at events. I have no strong fan attachment to either Kim or Davide. I'm only making observations about what I saw.
Whatever lens any of us have is the lens we have, emotional, objective, straightforward, opinionated, or a combination thereof, etc.
Yet, my observations are of things that were quite obvious.
(also, his FS is indeed the same than last season, but hasn't the choreo be simplified? I don't know, I just hadn't really noticed before that the choreo is mostly just arm movement, seemed a somewhat more balanced program 
). And then even his tech failed him.... 
Fingers crossed things turn around before Milan! 
She also judged the Men's FS at Worlds this year and 21 of 24 skaters were scored lower than the average by her, 10 of them by more than 5 points. She particularly hated Nika Egadze, who she scored a whopping 15.59 points lower than the control panel.)
