Geoff,

I like the idea of prioritizing but in my experience you need to "fix" a couple of things in order to make that work.

We developed our own motors since 2011, so naturally we were really strong in that area of design. We always had the "motor guy" in our design team. At about 2/3 of all DE, no judge was able to ask the motor guy questions about motor design because it is a very unique area. Sometimes it was "what power/torque does it have". That was about it.
At -I think it was FSG 2012- the "powertrain judge" just asked "What is the critical temperature of part A,B,C,D...." that was powertrain judging.

So if you have to make a desicion to weight your design areas, you have to know what kind of judges do you get. Sometimes you are lucky and get the "one" expert in the whole DE judging team in your cue. But most of the time you have a problem in a specific area.
At an event like FSAE-A it could probably work because all teams get the same judges.

The next "problem" is, that most judges that I had as a participant didn't really care about the "area of design" they should focus on. Most of the time the judge which introduced itself as Aero judge started with 2-3 Aero questions and afterwards asked about basically every detail of the car, from tires over torsional stiffness to powertrain data. If this judges is only grading the "Aero section" but takes the whole "experience" into account, it probably gets complicated.
I don't want to take the freedom away from the judges though, to ask something from other areas which could be interessting to get the overall impression of the team.
How is that handled at FSAE A?