Minor note. The actual rules ONLY require a pitch departure in the proper direction. There is NO requirement for the judges to see a yaw departure. I am not saying that you should or should not have a yaw departure, only that the rules do not require that the judge see one.

Frankly I think there is WAY too much emphasis on snaps now. People are obsessed with them, probably because sequence designers seem to be snap happy, especially at the Shootout. And many judges seem to be overly harsh in judging them. An observation I made both watching AND judging the Invitational class at the Shootout was that snaps were NOT the problem. The single biggest and most consistent error I saw and downgraded for was unequal lines before and/or after the dreaded snaps and other roll elements.

A good example was a half bow tie in one of the Unknowns. Pull to 45, 4 point roll, opposite full roll, push to vertical downline, positive snap, opposite negative snap, pull to 45 up line and more rolls going up. Nearly every single pilot I judged had a displacement on ALL three line segments. Some were minor, but still good for 1 point per leg, 3 points off the total figure. Others were far worse. Many had greater than 2 to 1 displacement on one or more legs, and that's 3 POINTS each!! A couple missed the line after the 4-point/opposite roll which earned them a 4 point hit.

Think about it. In a figure like that if you only had the 2 to 1 displacement on all three legs (which was VERY common) you could not get better than a 4 (2 points off per leg = minus 6 points).

I know that I am going to pay WAY more attention to my line lengths from here on out.