one perhpas "unfair" issue with this scoring system is that it penalizes strings by their length (e.g. unique(...,'sorted') costs more points than unique(...,'rows')) which encourages attempting to avoid strings all together...

That's good point. Thanks for your involvement Alfonso. I will disable this feature. I thought it's right approach to count strings like that but your argument shows there are many exceptions, so... not a good idea.

but I liked your fix for the ans trick, I wish that was part of the standard cody scoring!