If I were trying to get a friend interested in figure skating,
First I would enthusiastically point out all the great stuff that each of the skaters do -- a difficult jump element, a more difficult jump element that no one else is doing, and especially well-performed jump, a great spin and what's great about it, quality of movement over the ice -- speed, effortlessness, complexity, deep edges (how far the skater is leaning away from vertical, how big the curves are that s/he makes, how bent the skating knee is), beautiful body line, timing movements to the music especially well, expressing the character of the music especially well, telling a coherent story or having a coherent set of abstract images in the choreography, skating with energy and conviction, skating without mistakes (especially for a skater who has a history of making them but is having a breakthrough today).
Whatever happened to impress me most about each performance, I would share with my friend.
And if the skater did make a costly mistake, whether obvious to the casual eye or not, I would comment that it was likely to cost a lot of points.
I might make comments and guesses about how a given program, or a specific element, was likely to score. I might express surprise at a result or point out areas where I disagreed with specific decisions if known -- general PCS is the most likely while an event is in progress, we don't usually know about downgrades, GOEs, etc., until looking at the protocols after the fact.
But mostly I would focus on the skating first, not the scoring. I would try to get my friend interested in the actual skating first.
If I were trying to give a general idea of what is most valuable, what is likely to earn high scores and help skaters to win, I would focus on the quality of the skating skills and on the jump content, because those have historically been the most important determinants of results, under all judging systems. I would try not to give any impression that obvious mistakes like falls would or should automatically take a skater out of contention, because that has never been true. I would only acknowledge that the skater would lose points for the mistake, but I'd try to put the points lost in the context of all the other areas in which the skater was deservedly racking up points.
I watched the men's SP from Worlds with my 11-year-old nephew, and that's approximately the approach I took, tailored to his age and interests, including the fact that he's American and has the same first name as one of the competitors we watched.
If we were watching a long program, I would also mention short program standings and how much of a lead a skater might have had if a poorer long program looked likely to place lower than that skater had placed in the short.
Specific details about the scoring I would gloss over with a new viewer, except in response to a direct question. My aim would be to help the newbie appreciate the skating -- in all its complexity -- rather than to focus on whether the results were "correct" or not, and if not who was to blame.
If, on the other hand, I were watching with a lapsed fan who had followed skating in the 20th century and was trying to understand the changes in how the sport is practiced now, then I'd pay more attention to the kinds of program construction and content that the new scoring system encourages or discourages compared to the old system my friend used to know something about, how certain qualities are now significantly more, or less, valuable than my friend remembered. And we could share opinions about what we like better in one era compared to another.
But again, I wouldn't spend a lot of time focusing on specific PCS or other decisions that I and my friend disagree with, on what we might consider lapses on the part of the judges (or technical panel) or flaws in the way the system is designed, until the friend was already up to speed on how the system is supposed to work. It's hard to get a sense of the bigger picture by putting all the attention on exceptions.
