[Precarious]

I saw you bring this up in the Odd-22 thread. Obviously I'm going to be a bit limited in what I can suggest, simply because I'm orders of magnitude below the relevant ability level here, but I *can* say this isn't a Brutal+ difficulty-exclusive issue. AAAs on difficulty x tend to be more impressive than flags on x+1 almost across the spectrum, and that's before accounting for frequent errors in difficulty assignment.

But I feel like you're getting at a larger point that doesn't have an answer. One reason people seem to talk about individual scores more than average level is that any algorithm is going to be somewhat inconsistent, because songs don't always scale the same way. I've heard that Husigi, for example, is relatively easy for a very high level player to SDG, but very hard to AAA. The spreadsheet stats seem to bear that out. A formula that accurately rewards performance on that song would probably need to penalize raw goods more harshly than on another song that is equally difficult to AAA, but harder to score on generally. Since adjusting every song for its quirks is impossible (or at least impossibly impractical), we can only do our best.

In any case, though, I agree with your basic premise. A lot of people seem to disdain playing for AAAs, since Etterna, osu!, etc. don't, but that's what FFR is built around, and I don't see a problem with maintaining that focus. I think accelerating AAA-decay is probably a reasonable approach in general. I'd also like to see difficulties reviewed, and not just in the 98+ realm, although I realize that's beyond the scope of this discussion.