So when CIF went to SBLive a few years ago, one of the ideas was that each section could devise its own rating formula to avoid using MP's proprietary one. That never worked at all, because getting people to agree on the details of any such complex formula is all but impossible. No section, as far as I know, did anything but use MaxPreps.
As for just getting past the sections, first they would have to essentially fire themselves, which isn't going to happen. But it would make for better brackets, as D1 girls showed. The way the process works is that each section submits a list of teams in ranking order. So the section tells the NorCal committee that Team A is better than Team B and the committee will almost always go along.
In D1, there were seven CCS teams, so the first thing they did was put them in different brackets, regardless of seeding. Next they looked at the lists from SJS, NCS, Oakland and the Northern Section. The Northern section commissioner had one goal in the meeting, which was to keep Pleasant Valley out of D1, so that wasn't going to happen. The OAL representative somehow convinced the committee that those forfeit losses were real losses, so Oakland Tech was out as well.
Now all that was left was NCS and SJS, and in SJS, the three teams were ranked in this order: Oak Ridge, Whitney and McClatchy. So McClatchy had to be the lowest seed of those three teams. With seven of the bracket spots filled by CCS, six NCS slots had to be filled -- and again, the committee chose to avoid section rematches and ignore true seeding. So the six NCS teams were placed, leaving three spots.
McClatchy was the last team placed, and for whatever reason was 16th instead of 13th or 14th. I'm guessing it was because the way the bracket was filled, and the committee felt that well, 16 isn't that much different than 13, so what the heck.
Without sections, that wouldn't have happened.