Well, no, I like the idea of this system, it has many advantages. For me the most important ones are
1. You can be on podium after screwing up a short program, so you can move up as much as 7 places or so.
2. Spins. They just got miles better.
3. You can clearly see why some skaters were propped up and finished high and why some were lowballed. In 6.0 some would have no idea why certain skater got 5.5 for technical merit with excellent jumps or sth.
4. You can compare performances from different competitions (well, at least theoretically)
5. You cannot cheat. Underrotations and wrong edges were never seen in 6.0 era.
1. That has nothing to do with the system. That was the fact that judges wouldn't have the courage to place someone in the second to last flight at the top if they had a great skate and the top contenders bombed. Honestly, I hate this first argument, because you're trying to pin "no movement from Short to Long" on the system, when it was the judges. You could do the same under 6.0, though it was rare. Bad judging is bad judging, no matter what system you're in.
There are two separate issues here.
One is that skate order and which long program group a skater was in did have at least an unconscious effect on judges' willingness to score an early performance high enough to hold up against the final-group skaters, and they did tend to overscore poor performances in the final group relative to comparable performances in an earlier group. This happens with both judging systems. I'm not sure it's ever the judges' conscious intent to hold down earlier skaters, but since the psychological effect of expectations is real, it doesn't really matter to the skaters effected whether the judges did it on purpose or not.
The other issue is that with factored placements, how far a skater who placed low in the short and much higher in the long depended not only on who s/he beat in the long and by how much, but also on what order those other skaters finished in relative to each other.
Suppose you're 6th in the short program and win the free skate. How far can you move up -- what color medal do you get, if any? Well, if your name is Alexei Urmanov, it could be bronze (1991 Lalique), silver (1995 Europeans), or gold (the infamous 1997 Europeans). The difference is not in your placements, but in the long program placements of the five skaters who beat you in the short. You didn't control your own destiny.
With IJS, if you win the freeskate from 6th place, then your medal if any could also be any color, but it depends entirely on whether you can beat each skater ahead of you by more than they beat you in the short. It makes no difference what order they finish in relative to each other.
2. I agree that it made people focus on spins.... but better? Really? I've made this point in this thread before, so I'll spare you all again.
On average, spins today are faster with more revolutions and better positions than a decade or more ago. Obviously there were some exceptions in the past, and there were some good simple, often relatively brief, spins in the past. But there were also a lot of mediocre and bad simple spins in the past.
The skill level now is higher. It's common for skaters to have many revolutions of fast centered spin in reasonably good positions and then to transition to another variation with a more labored position, that slows down, etc. So if you're a glass half-empty kind of person, you'll see the mistake and think the whole spin is bad. If you're a glass half-full person, you'll see all the good stuff that the skater did during that spin as outweighing the mistake. YMMV.
Now instead of taking in the performance, I'm trying to look at if they pre-rotated on the ice or finished the jump during the landing or if they flipped over to an inside edge on their lutz...
Because you're more knowledgeable now, for better or for worse. Some of us were looking for edge and rotation problems in the 6.0 era as well, and so were the judges. But the TV commentators rarely mentioned these problems and the average viewer had no idea they mattered.
Would you consider the 2002-2006 quad to be 6.0 or IJS?
