I agree with your overall point, although there are reasons why we use hard cutoffs like that: they are objective. If somebody is traveling at 55 mph on a strai

I agree with your overall point, although there are reasons why we use hard cutoffs like that: they are objective. If somebody is traveling at 55 mph on a straight highway, on a clear warm sunny day, they can be sure[0] they aren't breaking any laws. Everybody recognizes it's not perfect; but in reality a cop isn't going to a write a ticket for 56 in a 55 (unless they have some ulterior motive). They might write a ticket for dangerous driving at 45 if the conditions are bad enough. There's still some human element, but we try to minimize it because it creates an opportunity for corruption and inequality in enforcement of laws. In the case of sports the judging is supposed to have a human element, but the judges are supposed to only care about the performance and routine and not stuff like the nationality of the gymnast. Which is an unrealistic hope frankly. So pick your poison; either we take subjective human judgement and accept it will wanted and unwanted subjective elements, or we do this stuff and remove subjectivity. [0] There's always measurement error but that's a separate issue.