Hot Take: DCI judges are very good at their jobs, and almost always get it “right”
Every single post-show scores thread, you’ll see countless comments about who should’ve won what captions, how the points spread is unbelievably large, and just general bemusement that your favorite show didn’t win.
I honestly have really never understood this, because I think that the judges are generally correct, especially at following the evaluation criteria as written on their sheets, and usually the corps that wins, especially at DCI finals, is the one that deserves too.
If you look back at old videos, and see the champs and second place, you can almost always see, the winners move just a little better, they play just a little cleaner, the show is just a little better designed, the color guard spins better, the pit is mixed better, I could go on. I think there are few years where anyone was actually “robbed” at dci finals, and when you looks at how captions actually are scored, they’re usually broken down in the correct order