Jerry Whorebach wrote:

There's a difference between rewarding the player for taking risks, and rewarding her for taking stupid, pointless, unnecessary risks, and bullet-scratching (or any similarly counter-intuitive scoring technique) falls squarely into the latter category. I believe playing for score should encourage better, more rational play over number-crunching or "gaming the system." The issue isn't so much one of realism as internal logic or thematic consistency. See: any game that requires sacrificing a ship to get the highest possible score.