1.01x speed DT gives as many points as regular DT. This ruins the integrity of the whole competition.
I fundamentally disagree with adding freemod in the first place. This does not make the spotlights more competitive. All it does is make it more grindy and less balanced. And this is on top of the already horrible combo scoring system that makes everything exhaustingly grindy.
This is a small thing (for now at least), but the number of bonus spins doesn't seem to appear anymore in gameplay for me. That is important information to know if you want to maximize your score.
Another small thing is that when you first set a score in a playlist lobby, two versions of that score will appear on the leaderboard. This is fixed if you just reload the leaderboard, but it is worth mentioning anyway.
Also, why do slider ends STILL basically not count? I've never seen anyone be positive about this change. On the wiki page for the Spotlights it says "highlighting beatmaps for their excellent and unique design and gameplay." Despite this, no real effort has been made to significantly reward players for actually playing sliders as they were intended to be played. This ruins the flow of slider maps, of which there have been many picked for this competition over the seasons.
I apologize for being so harsh. It is just that it is very hard to be enthusiastic about a project that is in a significantly worse state than it was in the first season, which was 10 months ago.