USS has promotion of the Olympics as its primary purpose? If this is true and Olympians rig and tune their own boats then tuning is part of the discipline.
I'll risk being labeled a heretic: NOT permitting individual teams to tune their own boats was a major flaw of the old system.
Tuning is part of the discipline, tuning is good.
We had a tough enough time addressing boat maintenance between rotations and getting rotations fast (10 minutes on the beach was a great rotation)...imagine the delay if everyone was re-tuning their spreader rake, diamond wire tension, mast rake, etc. etc....Additionally, in the case of charter boats, what if someone made that adjustment and exceeded a setpoint, damaged the boat, and cost us a boat in our rotation. It just wouldn't be practical in the old scenario to allow the teams to make that level of adjustment.
The goal was to take most of "the boat" out of the equation and put the result at the hand of the sailors. A range of adjustments were usually established (light to heavy crew weight, light to heavy wind) and adjustments were put in the middle of this range. Sailor adjustments were pretty much limited to mainsheet cleat angle and trap height.
