I think this current format is kind of cool:

We drew names for boats and fleets (A & B). For your first race your score is your finish, regardless of which fleet you were in. After the first race in each fleet, the top five from each are in A and bottom five in B. So you want to be in top 5 in your first race, because after that if you're in B you are scored your position plus 10.

After the first race the bottom three in A in each race get 'flushed' to B and the top three from B move up to A. So if you're in A you try to finish 7 or better in each race to avoid a visit to B fleet. Although you will get 2 throwouts after 10 races so one trip to B will not kill you.