It’s actually the opposite; breaking pots is indirectly tied. They give you Phantasma, which may or may not get you additional Anima powers, which are themselves completely RNG-dependent. The Broker may not have any extra useful/significant ones that his additional Phantasma will let you buy, and if it gives you a Cell choice, that Anima cell may or may not get you a useful/significant power.
Ultimately though, missing out of score from pots doesn’t mean you’re “never popping them”. It’s that you’re not focusing on completing every one. This might mean you’re docking 5 points because you broke 80% of them (instead of the 90% for Pillager), as well as whatever completion % that translates to, e.g. another 3 points.
Rescuing Souls on the other hand directly gives you straight % Primary stat (and soon health), but if you’re beating the last boss anyway, it’s power that you didn’t need. The only way additional Souls affect you at that point, aka the only reason to keep rescuing more, IS to pad score, because you had all the required power without them anyway.
As such it becomes harder to get a high score and not being able to means you have stuff to learn before moving on.
Being able to get those bonuses are the same way. It demonstrates knowledge of the runs by being able to stack them this shows your likly more skilled at the runs themselves as take the time to learn. Do you need to do it no but non the less makes the score harder to get if not.
Think about it this further though. You have to go through ticking off score at every level to get to the next one. What you have NOT learned by level 8 or 9 (hell, arguably Layer 4) that 4-starring there is going to “teach” you more? Do you actually think people are trying to go past to Level 10 this week and don’t know that you can knock down phylacteries for Phantasma?
The only things people are potentially missing out at that points is the special points critera from https://www.wowhead.com/guides/torghast-scoring-system-shadowlands#torghast-scoring-system-score-charts - except none of that is properly explained in-game, so either they’ve already looked it up, or have now lost time and are being frustrated into going and looking it up.
The system is not perfect no but it is much better than the old way of going in blind with no feedback till you hit a roadblock with a harder than avg boss, making you feel your time was wasted unfairly.
Cool, now that we’ve accepted the premise that “the old system” had severe information flaws, let’s address that. The roadblocks came as a result of poor class design, poor boss tuning (e.g. certain bosses being out of tune with others), actual difficulty being backloaded purely into end-bosses while all the trash and minibosses on the way were trivial, and the sheer RNG of anima powers and bosses masking any true assessment of difficulty.
Has any of that changed in 9.1? Does the scoring system inform you of anything that would in any way touch on these? It really doesn’t. If anything, it adds its own separate set of things to the pot for someone to have to look up and work around.
This is the key diff. Nothing says you are not ready if you got a low score but a high score dose show you likly are. This fixes the vary issue I mentioned people feeling they got cheap shotted by a power spike between layers since they happened to get a easy last layer by making you refine the last layer to a point before moving on.
How? If you got an easy previous layer, and you run around completing a checklist to get overkill levels of power and beat an easy boss to a pulp, what does that possibly do for you against an actually difficult boss on the next power jump? The difficult in THAT run comes because of their mechanics, or maybe you got bad Anima Power RNG, or something, and possibly still “difficult” even after gaining every drop of Phantasma, Souls, etc.
The idea that scouring a floor for 100% of pots instead of 75% of pots on a previous unrelated run, on an easier difficulty, is going to change how you feel about the roadblock before you is beyond ludicrous.