There are really two issues: The concept and the execution.
The concept of competitive equity makes sense to me. Just because a school has a lot of students doesn't mean it has a good basketball program. After all, you don't need many players to be a quality program.
And using competitive equity, you can separate schools of similar size that play by different rules, or to put it more politely, have different priorities.
Enrollment does not work, as my long comment upthread about Bishop O'Dowd explains. (And remember when SMS was Division III or Pinewood Division V? Now that was fair ...)
So for me, the big issue is execution. I actually have little problem with the seeding of Division I, the one I'm most familiar with, though of course if Miramonte had been an eight I might be singing a different song.
Suggestion one: Have a girls' basketball-only CIF committee to do the seeding. Active coaches cannot be on the committee because there's just too much bias, and of course someone who coached for 20 years at a school, even retired, is still going to be leaning. But if that committee focused only on girls' basketball all season, then you'd have a decent shot at getting better bracketing.
Suggestion two: Open the seeding meeting. No comments allowed, unless the committee wanted a question answered by someone in the audience. That way, coaches could see what the committee valued and how decisions were made. Obviously, there are a lot of ways to do it -- is the body of work more important than head-to-head? Depends on your point of view.
I doubt many people would make the trip to Sacramento, but the gain would be transparency and a sense that the committee was making its decisions based on publicly available data.
