At the highest levels, Scrabble is not a word game at all. It's a territory control game with 200,000 different valid ways to play resources.
Most hilarious read on why Scrabble should be played like a territory control war game
I love the Terry Pratchett reference too!
If one cares about score whatsoever, I'm not sure how one could play without paying a great deal of attention to gaining/denying access to the multiplier tiles.
Many people don’t realize that, in competitive games, the goal isn’t to make a high score, it is to make a score that’s higher than that of your opponents.
Another game where many players dont realize that is Twister (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(game) ). You shouldn’t play to make it easy for yourself to stay in play, you should play to make it easier for you than for your opponents to stay in play. In general, that means occupying circles close to your opponent, rather than those easily reachable by you. You should try to ‘lock’ your opponents in a corner of the playing area.