Fred Mueller wrote:

I'm kinda new at this,

New enough that you haven't used a finish line with the ground at the
bottom? If you haven't, it might be harder to understand how it works
out in practice.

but here's my two cents worth. There is an
advantage to a finish line that we don't see with a cylinder finish.
Everyone is funneled through a fairly precise point so we know where to
look for traffic and we have a fairly good idea how their pattern to
land will look. In a cylinder finish, all bets are off and every type
of pattern entry known to man from every possible direction is
accomplished along with often unpredictable results,

I don't see this happening in the contests I've flown with large, high
cylinder finishes. All the pilots that had a good finish have been able
to use the standard pattern to land. Pilots that did not have a good
finish often used non-standard patterns, such as rolling finishes or no
downwind leg, and so on.

this is especially
bad during a MAT or when different classes are finishing from different
directions.

My experience is the low finish line is worse in these conditions,
because the pilots are NOT being "funneled" (brought along a small angle
sector) to a precise point: they arriving_ spread out more or less along
the line from many different directins, including 180 degrees apart,
with some hooking the gate and doing a very non-standard pattern entry.
I've even seen 180s after a finish, with the glider landing back into
the oncoming finishers.

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Eric Greenwell
Washington State
USA