Perhaps there is another category for judges:
Judges who will watch the competition and do their best with NO preconceived notions about the skaters and their reputations.
Judges who will always give skaters like Mao, Plushenko, Miki, etc., the highest pcs no matter how they skate their program.
Is that a false assumption?
I think it's still asking the wrong questions.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that all judges will watch the competition and do their best with no preconceived notions about the skaters and their reputations.
Most of the
program component criteria have nothing to do with the success or failure of the elements. Performance/Execution will probably be most affected by mistakes, or in the other direction by a skater being especially "on" that day.
Skaters who have scored well in the past will often deservedly earn high PCS again even when they don't skate their best. Their marks may be a bit lower than they receive at their best, but they would still be deservedly higher than marks for skaters with lower overall skill levels.
That is especially true for Skating Skills, which is hard to evaluate as accurately as the judges when watching from distant seats in the arena and especially when watching on video at home.
So to a large degree the high scores are in fact deserved based on the actual skating that day and not on preconceived notions. The best skaters consistently get the best scores.
Now, there can be other factors that can exaggerate that effect unduly.
Among other things, Skating Skills addresses the effortless and security with which the blades move across the ice. A skater who does this extremely well will make a stronger overall impression that will legitimately affect the other components as well.
However, Skating Skills is the first component listed. Some judges may have developed a tendency to assign the SS score first and to think of the other components in terms of going up or down from that number. That's not the ideal way for PCS to be used -- they're supposed to be independent. So judges who fall into that habit, perhaps without consciously realizing it, may not be doing the best job of assigning PCS they're theoretically capable of, but they are still honestly trying to judge what they see.
Judges are human. Human perception is influenced by expectation. So to some extent, like the rest of us, judges often see what they expect to see. When watching a skater who has often skated very well in the past and skates slightly less well today, they may perceive a better overall impression than from a skater from whom they expect less.
This effect would account for the phenomenon that "once the judges know her better they will start to give her higher pcs." That does often tend to happen with newcomers to the elite scene. But much of it is an unconscious effect of expectations.
For all of the above reasons, honest judges who fall into your first category will still tend to give high scores to skaters who already have a reputation of being among the best. Most of it will be deserved. Some of it will be unconscious psychological effects that result in honest judges not doing the best job of assigning scores that they possibly could.
Then you might also get some other effects that are less honest and would push the judges into your second category:
Judges who assign scores more with an eye toward staying inside the "corridor" of marks on the panel. That means predicting how the rest of the panel would mark, using past scores for that skater as a clue in addition to what they see on the ice today. They may also be afraid to go out on a limb with drastically different marks for one component that stands out as extremely better or worse than the rest of the skater's performance.
That's more an effect of timidity, incompetence, or fear of being out of line.
Judges who out of feelings of national loyalty consciously overmark the skaters from their own country.
Judges who are pressured by their federations to hold up their own country's skaters and undermark their expected rivals, and perhaps to comply with deals to hold up skaters from other federations in exchange for similar consideration from that country's judges.
Those two are dishonest motivations.
From the outside, though, just looking at the numbers, it's pretty hard to figure out which effects are in fact leading to the numbers we disagree with. It might be mostly the honest reasons or mostly the incompetent or dishonest reasons or a mix of all of them. There's no need to jump to the conclusion that every time a score seems wrong to us there must be a nefarious reason.
Another thing to consider is that judges on the panel disagree with each other in various ways. One may be a generous marker who gives high scores to everyone, and another may tend to mark low in general or to be a real stickler for a particular pet peeve that other judges and fans don't care so much about. Some may make an active effort to spread their PCS for each skater, or for the field as a whole, as widely as possible, and others may tend to stick to a much narrower range. Some judges may emphasize some particular criteria for each component, and other judges or fans may emphasize different criteria. Some may reflect certain areas of overlap between the PCS in one of the relevant components that another judge reflects in a different component.
Most of those differences will get flattened out in the averaging. So there might be one or more judges who scored similarly to the way you would have scored, but they were balanced out by other judges who perceive things differently.
The same thing would happen if we got a bunch of fans to score the programs and then averaged our scores.
No one individual has the one correct score, with everything else automatically being wrong.
