I'll try to remember back to the judges' school last March...On figure 6- There's no requirement for the top of the second 45 upline to be at the same altitude as the top of the loop. If I remember right, both of the 45 lines need to be a wind-corrected 45 degrees, the half-roll needs to be centered on the first 45 upline, and the 3/4 loop needs to be round, but that's all! So I would think you can draw as long of a line as you need to in order to hit a good split-S airspeed.
I bet figure 8 is drawn like that only for Form B/C layout reasons. It's a regular ol' reverse half-Cuban.
About this sequence... Have you been practicing the proposed sequence, or the one that was adopted by the IAC a week or two ago? The approved sequence has a couple of changes from what was proposed. Here's an excerpt from the Nov. 12th announcement by the IAC Rules Committee chairman, Brian Howard:
2003 Sportsman Power Known
The proposed sequence (as currently posted on the IAC web site) was modified as follows:
Replace Fig. #1 with a vanilla loop (7.5.1)
Delete Fig. #9, the loop
Renumber the full slow roll (proposed Fig. #10) as Fig. #9
Add new Fig. #10, a 270-deg. turn (2.1.3)
So they decided to throw out the humpty (boo!), and put in a 270-degree turn (double boo!). I wonder why they decided to dumb-down the sequence?
Tom P.