Why give a 6 when you could give a 0 or a 10 depending on advance polling data? Score voting devolves into approval voting for sufficiently informed and tactical voters, and provides less impactful ballots to the tactically naive.

No, a new single winner election system is a distraction. What we need is proportional representation, to ensure that more people actually have representatives in proportion to their political desires.

You didn't understand the parent's point. The independent has 60% of the population giving him a 10.

You replace the claim about voting method with a claim about who can get on the ballot. That is as big of a change as changing the voting method.

There are options for managing ballot access:

* Since there is no spoiler effect, you could just let everyone on the ballot. Letting abstentions count as zero votes, obscure candidates cannot win. (Less severely, abstention could count as a fractional zero vote, i.e. 0 in the numerator of the average and 0<x<1 (say x = .25) in the denominator...)

* Or require a certain number of signatures to let a candidate on the ballot.