If you're treating CSS as a hardcore competitive game, then you should only care about the playoffs. The regular season is just filler to make sure that you've done enough to qualify and maybe to grab a couple extra points, which has never changed the victor in the modern cash era.
Even then, the game doesn't even award players who price showcases well: the game awards those who stumble >$251 into a showcase twice as many points, and punishes people for going over. CSS punishes you for getting on the wrong side of close, and punishes you if you magically get into that range, but over on the other. Blowing 12 DSWs and WSDing 16 times will make you realize that.
The only way to make the game more closely resemble pricing skill would be to remove that penalty for overs, and drastically decrease the bonuses for getting within DSW/Exacta range. But at that point, are you really playing along with the show?
And when you're dealing with a bunch of trips that only pop up in the showcases, a random $5,400 coffee machine, or a 12-day trip of China that's $6,000 that's not a skill of pricing: that's a game of luck, hoping the prizes are about the same price as the previous ones in the same geographical area/field.
So, have fun however you want to play it. Make your own scoring system if you want; Wayo's very clearly given out everyone's bid if you want to recalculate factoring out Plinko/Fridays/Perfect Shows. I don't care enough to do so.
