to me difficulty scores in stunts (which I think is what we are mainly talking about here) are somewhat objective at least to the degree that X skill gets you into Y RANGE. The reason X skill can't give you Y exact value is partly due to the huge number of possible combinations (What's more difficult a 1.25 up with a high to high tick tock, or a 1.5 up with a low to high tick tock?) and the fact that there are still new skills that have never been competed so how would they get scored the first time they were ever done? What about a team that does 3 1.5 ups and 2 full ups vs. a team that does 5 1.25 ups? Just throwing out some examples but my main point is that there are too many possible combinations of skills that are not necessarily comparable to one another. In gymnastics (at the very basic level) you are either flipping, twisting, or some combination of both and you are either doing it forward or backward, so each flip gets you x amount of difficulty frontwards and y amount of difficulty backward, and then the same for twists. Stunts have Twisting mounts, twisting transitions, twisting dismounts, release moves that change legs, release moves that don't change legs, twisting dismounts, flipping dismounts, 6 standard body positions, release moves from the ground, release moves from the top, coed stunts, all girl stunts with no backspots, traditional all girl stunts, all girl stunts with a front spot, etc etc etc... So my belief is that the way it is currently set up, it's not possible for anyone to sit down and figure out every single possible combination of entries, transitions, dismounts, and body positions, and assign it a point value that all falls between 9 and 10, especially without going out to 4 or 5 decimal places... The way it is now, the rubric objectively places you into a range of scores, which you should be able to figure out from the companies rubric, then it's up to the judge to assign your point value within that range. The trick is to find judges who are extremely familiar with the companies rubric and expertly trained in it's execution, AND (I think this one gets overlooked a lot) find judges that still have their iron in the cheerleading fire, so to speak. It is imperative that companies hire people who are currently involved in the sport and have a true knowledge of how these building and tumbling skills are being executed, how difficult they really are for kids to perform etc etc... Unfortunately winning a bunch of high school national championships 15-20 years ago or teaching summer camps for the company you're judging for, don't necessarily make you qualified... That's just my opinion, and this post is long enough that I doubt most people will read it anyway