Right now we ask trained judges to, via at the moment and by eyesight, to judge all the parts of difficulty AND exeuction/performance at once. Well... sometimes easy skills are performed so well and with such flair they seem more difficult. As well sometimes hard skills that are insanely harder than everyone elses struggle a hair with execution and are therefore rewarded less.
Then you throw in the smoke and mirrors of how many people actually do a skill to how many are on the floor.
So, what if we did this:
There are 3 judges (just a number that popped off the top of my head) that judge the execution of every category, performance, and creativity of the routine live. And that is it. They do not do difficulty. Then a separate judge later looks at a video and goes through and rewards the skills difficulty wise more objectively. HD video is easily possible (we already do it for legalities). If you do 5 standing fulls in a group of 15 people to try and make it look like more someone could actually count.
Reasons I like this idea:
The high energy performances of the routines would not be lost while judging. In fact judges would have only one piece of the puzzle that have to worry about. How well did they do what they attempted to do. They don't care how easy or how hard. Strictly based on how well it was executed.
Difficulty would no longer be hidden or covered. If you have a faker you wont be rewarded because there is video evidence of it. Ratios would actually matter and all the fake stunts that we hope people dont notice would finally matter.
If a team was improperly rewarded for difficulty it could actually be argued, but performance/creativity/all that stuff that can only be done live would not be changed.
Thoughts?