Holy shit THIRD top post painting today!
Onward; Caroline Williams; 1987; VUW 1987.5

Do we know with certainty that Tina Aeberli is competing in routines? I saw she scratched in Shred Off. I feel like even if Tina A is rusty, I would have her favored over the field.
I haven't watched much of Yuji, but Yoshi has impressed the hell out of me with his choreo and presentation. I agree this could be a lot of fun.
I don't know how much I'd read into the qualifying round. I got the impression from a lot of the routines that people were playing it safely, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive jump in difficulty and originality in Finals.
I agree with all of this. The Finals pool looks like it has about 3 tiers. Honza and Vasek are their own tier, followed by another tier of contenders that could surprise them but are still underdogs, followed by a tier that is capped by difficulty. It is interesting to me, because with the old format of live competition a difficult routine was a double-edged sword. If you hit it the difficulty helped your score...but the difficulty also made it more likely you'd drop. You can see in some years where easier routines with good choreo snuck onto the podium as a result. This year's format though still rewards difficulty, but eliminates much of the risk. I expect the choreo of all finals routines will be solid, and therefore difficulty and execution will play a bigger role in parsing out where people finish.
I wonder about this. I agree that this year's format is ideal for setting up the highest score of all time. Looking at the entrants though, I wonder who is motivated to shoot for this. I think Simku, Honza, Blau, and Landes (if he submits anything) could all challenge for something in the 280 range. But I'm just not sure if anybody is all that motivated. I wouldn't be shocked if you told me somebody gets silver with like a 240 or something relatively low in that range.
I am curious to see how they run the show on August 1. It'd be cool to have live commentary. I'm also curious how they'll do podiums and announce results. Maybe I can set up a Scotch-cam, where people can see live whether I break my 869 dry streak.
Interesting thought. I hadn't really thought about BAP so far. I suppose he would be a good candidate. Has he been active on other forums in the past years? Not on social media so not sure.
Just to clarify, the Worlds Team kindly provided the scoring cards for every matchup so we could see how each judge voted for each matchup. Pretty neat to see this level of transparency. I know the NBA MVP voting has moved towards this style of transparency, and that has resulted in better results (since people don't want to be shamed for being the single vote for Carmelo the year LeBron should have been the unanimous MVP).
Yeah, good clarification. Better than ambiguous Andy.