I think simply because you can. It's a bit of fun after a day's racing to go back and look at the neurals and say, now what would have happened if I set these ones higher and these ones lower. What would the result be? And it's amazing how by tweaking things a certain way, you can improve the results. Of course, doing that with just one day's results doesn't mean that you'll be on to a future winning system, but if you continue to experiment with it over a longer period of time, then you can come up with something good.

Also, different people like to concentrate on different things in the neurals and want to have certain types of horses ranked highly in the ratings. For example, I ALWAYS set the Barrier category to zero. That's because I personally don't mind horses coming from wide barriers as the slightly lower strike rate is usually offset by higher dividends. On the other hand, some other punters may be dead against horses starting from wide barriers so they might set the barriers category to 5.

Also, you asked about whether the categories are scored evenly. Well, pretty much, except for a few anomolies. The CP, CF and Tim categories all tend to produce higher scores than the others. On some occasions, one horse's score for one of these 3 categories is so far in front of the rest of the field, that it renders all of the other sections pretty meaningless. You might want to experiment with setting these 3 categories to one and the other categories to three or something like that. You may even want to take them out of the equation completely. On some occasions those 3 categories can lead to some good priced winners though.

The main thing is to have a look at it, experiment and see what you can come up with.