While I fully welcome the change to improve the situation for scoring at the end of the game, and the eventual roll-out to auto-score human vs bot games, I am concerned about the upgrade to the score estimator for use in the middle of games:
The previous score estimator was terrible, so I don’t think too many people took it seriously and it hopefully didn’t impact too many games. However, with players now able to query a strong AI to evaluate the current position, it seems that the score estimator would provide a reliable (and potentially undesirable) form of strong AI assistance.
For example, sometimes my opponent might make a blunder that I would not realize and fail to capitalize on (essentially one blunder followed by another). However, even with a strong AI that only gives the score estimate (or even just win probability), that might tip me off that my opponent’s last move presents an opportunity that I should search for, and thus even a basic (but reliably strong) score estimator could provide unfair AI assistance.
However, the score estimator provides even more than that, by highlighting confidence about territory, which can guide my next moves. Further, it seems that one can even play out some moves with analysis on and have the score estimate judge those positions, so it provides assistance in judging my next move as well.
I urge that you consider disabling the score estimator feature for all ranked games.