It feels intrinsically pretty cheems to just say "this sounds tricky so we shouldn't bother" when the existing system is completely dysfunctional
This is a political problem, so it recurses quite a lot. Whatever set of heuristics you come up with, someone will object to them because they will be losers if we use those heuristics. Then someone will object to the composition of the committee that generated the heuristics. Then someone will object to the system that system that came up with the committee....
Of course, we should try to figure out solutions. But these are "wicked problem" [1]. Solutions are not easy to come by, and there will always be objectors. You can't turn this into a well-defined technical problem with a well-formed solution.