> What's the point of having inclusion guidelines if you can just change them willy nilly to suit your own agenda?

You said it yourself: they're guidelines. I'm glad there are humans in the loop to exercise judgement when the guidelines may be giving a funny results.

> We need a more algorithmic index, not one ruled by one central committee.

IIRC, there already are many "algorithmic indexes", but they're not the S&P500 and there's no reason for the S&P500 to be one.