[xtothez]

XP is great for keeping the rankings more open-ended. I made a very agressive start to the round, and spent the first 2-3 weeks top 10 in XP and size. After being badly roided down twice, I was still able to keep a decent ranking due to my early XP. In the old PA you could lose an entire rounds achievement in a few ticks, since all you had to show from early good playing was more roids and ships. If someone landed a few solid attacks or even fleetcatches, everything would be lost.
Right now 40% of the score keeping me in the top 25 is from early XP - a reward for playing well earlier in the round.

As for stockpiling to stay above bash limit - if it was prevented somehow and people with a large resource income found themselves with no unallied targets, their motivation and activity would suffer. This is a little unfair to expect people who have done well to simply stop playing for the final weeks because of their success.