I think this is acknowledged by the opening "This is a really sophomoric opinion." Even so, if you agree upon the metric and then use it to rank systems, if on

I think this is acknowledged by the opening "This is a really sophomoric opinion." Even so, if you agree upon the metric and then use it to rank systems, if one system ranks better then you have "proven", by the agreed upon terms of comparison, that this system is superior. There may be other systems outside the ranking, but your proposal was to rank certain specific systems, not to discover the optimal system.