I only occasionally watch figure skating, but I do skate a little myself, which makes me really appreciate some of the stuff I see world-class skaters not only doing, but making look easy. Still, as someone with a mathematics degree, there are three things about the scoring system that have always seemed, well, whacko to me.
First, there's this whole business of the ordinals. If the point is to come out with a ranking at the end, why not just have the judges rank the competitors to start with and drop the 5.6...5.8...5.7...5.7... nonsense?
Second, there's the fiction that scores range from 0.0 to 6.0. When's the last time you saw anyone get less than a 5.5 in a serious competition? There's really very little room for discrimination among performances. If you're really basically ranking performers in 5 or 6 steps, then adopt a scoring scale that does that instead of pretending you really have 60 steps.
Finally, there's the whole idea that all the sports that do subjective judging do it differently. Skating does it one way, gymnastics another, and diving yet another. I have no idea how moguls and snowboarding do it. Couldn't representatives of all these sports get together and settle on one basic scheme?