My take is that both theories oversimplify things - we've already seen how this affects creative's theory in SFF matches.

My biggest problem with using uniform random variables as the underpinning of the stats is that the distribution clearly isn't uniform. This is most apparent with niche characters, where a few people like them a lot, while with other people they have a very low strength. CATS is an obvious example - the theory states that his strength maxes out at around 0.30 (for any given voter), while we know there are voters for whom CATS has a strength of 1.0. Because what we have is the average strengths, the uniform random variable simulation usually works as long as the two character's strengths with voters aren't correlated.

When I was thinking about stats last year, I was thinking a big breakthrough would be if we could figure out the actual distribution of strengths for a character, but I don't know how we could do that with the data provided. Although if there's any way to do it, it seems like we'll be getting some useful data for it this year.

As far as actually predicting anything that's going to happen this year goes... my thoughts haven't gotten that far yet. =)
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