The USTA didn't publish 2020 year-end ratings, so how far out of level are C rated players now?

The USTA made the decision, one that I consider to have been a mistake, to not publish ratings at the end of 2020.  This meant players that had played enough to get a year-end rating, and perhaps be bumped up or down, weren't, and they continued to play at their 2019 year-end level in 2021.

I wrote that this would likely cause issues this year and indeed I looked at the rate of DQ's in 2021 and it was higher than in 2019 which would support what I wrote about.

Well, I came across another interesting side-effect of not publishing, this being a team of largely C rated players that is now clearly above and headed to Sectionals.  I saw this team while doing some reports for someone for Sectionals.

Specifically, it is a 3.5 team where every 3.5 on the roster has a C rating, and all but two of them held C ratings at the end of 2018 too.  So this is not a team of appeal or self-rated players.

As of right now, my ratings show a full nine (!) players rated at 3.50 or higher, and a top-8 average of 3.60.  That's right folks, a 3.5 team with 8 players that can probably be competitive in many 4.0 matches.

Now, you  might say this is normal, a strong team at Sectionals has to have players playing above level and that is true, but I don't often see this many above level, especially when there are no self-rates or players that appealed down.

I would hypothesize that this occurred because no one was bumped up in 2020, and as a result players have had two years to improve and you'd expect significant improvement like this.  The problem is you have the majority of at level players who are legitimately at level and didn't improve and have to play these players, or lost out to them in playoffs.

For my hypothesis to hold water though, these players would have had to have been in position to be bumped up at 2020 year-end, which had ratings been published, made them ineligible to play 3.5 in 2021.

Again, using my ratings, I count 5 of the top 8 that almost certainly would have been bumped up 1 that probably would have been, and 2 others that were borderline.  If just the 5 obvious ones had been bumped up, this team would have been far more like a normal team, and it would have been fairer to the majority of other at-level players.

It will be interesting to see what happens at Nationals as we are likely to see a bunch of teams with a lot of out of level players.  On one hand, it may be an even playing field and fair to all teams at Nationals, but it still likely made local leagues a bit of a farce when everyone knew who would win and was dominated by them.

What do you think?  Is this a problem?  Or all sections had two years to improve so it is no big deal?