Darlene bless her heart was easily manipulated by a few grudging sailors back in 2002 to aid their scores in the numbers by having her implement false to no-logic theories to be integrated in to the US Sailing DP-N System. That was my problem then but now it looks like the new numbers have been corrected.
As I recall the Portsmouth System went downhill back in the ‘90s when it was taken over by US Sailing from the guy out in the west when he just got tired of running the system. I remember speaking with him back in 1989 when he was beyond ready to quit.
Then after the heyday of big numbers of Cat sailing races and participants in the 80’s and 90’s there was never enough good data to support the fundamental theory of computation used in the DP-N system.
Since the DP-N method using limited race result data and results from sailors with non-uniform abilities really never has been a reliable method (Garbage in Garbage out) I think a more Boat Measurement based configuration calculation should be used.
The new analytic calculations being used by the Americas Cup guys could probably tell to a whisker how a change of one half millimeter to any parameter or angle could predict a change in performance of the boat not the sailor. Make the boat numbers to be equated not the sailor’s abilities. The abilities should be the score result of a race.
That is why I like One Design Racing but since we have to use Handicap Racing sometimes because this is a dying sport and there are many configurations of boats that want to race at least US Sailing or someone should look at incorporating new technologies to equate dissimilar boats performance. Let only the sailor performance dictate the race results.