The new enzamas grade fes system feels weird but is certainly less painful than before, getting all the item rewards up to the 10-roll ticket is a breeze. It's like each of the six contestants competes in a parallel reality where they can throw appeals at judges even if you personally have knocked them out already, and there's less tactics involved in who to appeal to. Whereas before a maximum of 90 stars could be earned between all six units and you could be promoted with two gacchiri appeals if you got lucky, this time if you get a perfect 90* run the 2nd place unit might have something like 50*+ because they've been doing their parallel thing and can also earn 90* or close to that number by knocking out all judges.

If you can't get all 90* but are stuck in the 80s the other units are probably stealing one or two early bonus appeals? (I think you only get those stars if you get to the bonus limit first.) Also, interest up/down seems to work normally in affecting judges between all units, that would've been a bummer if it had changed. Also I dislike the artificial 7 turn limit, S-SSR6 Toru for example has a +150% Vo passive that only started working at turn 7+ and was useful for slow, interest-down control builds (especially L'Antica). The game clearly showing the percentage you'll get to with a Perfect appeal, and info on opponents' units and who they'll appeal to look like the best changes.

But you really need a 80*+ run in this new system to feel safe for promotion. The promotion/relegation score limits seem stupidly high this early in the week. The top 100 scorers of all groups for grades 5-7 seem to be separated by a few thousand pt, so I'm assuming every one of them has done a 90* Hard run. The changing weekly bonus points for choosing the right P-SSRs might became more important.