I don’t think going to 3 PCS categories is going to change anything because the problem is that the judges basically keep them in a range for each skater rather than letting them vary based on the actual skate. I understand the idea behind dropping the categories so judges only have to produce three, more intentionally considered scores but the reality is that the range of scores is still going to be in a 0.0 - 0.75 range based on rep and skate order.
But I would be thrilled to be proven wrong.
I tend to believe that the range of scores tends to be narrower than fans would like because in judges' minds the differences between most skaters' (or each performances') skill level in each category is much closer, compared to all skaters those judges have ever seen and judged, than it is in the minds of fans who only watch elite skating. Even when a skater with less-than-top skills is especially strong in one area (or vice versa), chances are that other criteria in the same component tend to bring the judge's impression of that component closer to the range of the other components.
While reputation and skate order undoubtedly have some effect on the scores, I suspect that most of the judges' conscious thoughts about PCS are indeed about how each component's criteria stack up about that judge's mental standards for 7 or 8 or 9 and the decimal increments between them, and that reputation and skate order are unconscious effects that may be more likely to flatten out the differences within a skater or to push up or down the overall score range in which judges perceive them.
Going to 3 PCS categories will likely keep the 3 components in an even closer range than using 5. I don't think narrow gaps are the "problem" that this proposal was trying to solve, because it's likely to do the opposite.
Even for judges who do try to distinguish each program component from the others, reducing the total number to 3 will undoubtedly make the scores closer together with fewer intentional "outliers" per judge per skater, because the criteria where a judge thinks that the skater is exceptionally strong or weak will end up getting averaged in with other criteria where the judge thinks that skater's skills are closer to the level of the other 2 components.
Also, if there are only 3 components with larger factors, it would probably be a good idea to let judges use increments of 0.1 again instead of 0.25, to allow for finer distinctions between skaters who are close but not identical in abilities for those criteria.
If judges do think in terms of ranking skaters on components, with only 3 components and only 0.25 differences available, they would often be in a situation where they think that skater C is noticeably but slightly better overall than skater A and noticeably but slightly worse overall than skater B, but if they've given A, say 7.75 8.0 8.25 and skater B 8.25 8.0 8.0, they don't have room to score skater C between them. That can also happen with 5 components, but it's much less likely.
And it also happens without judges making conscious comparisons between skaters (thinking in terms of ordinals) but just scoring each component on its own merits, either with wide or narrow ranges within skaters.
If there were 0.1 increments available, it would be easier to reflect fine distinctions between skaters.
I suspect fans might be able to see 8.0 and 8.5 as being a bigger gap psychologically if there were 4 possible scores between them than when there's only 1 intermediate option.
Because there was no ISU Congress in 2020, there were probably proposals that we had heard floated and started to discuss 2 years ago that never made it as far as an actual document to be discussed and voted on.
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