You know, I’ve never thought about that, but it does seem pretty sensible. I guess I’d have to see a table of probabilities to see what a purely mathematical mapping of chances of getting a certain card combination to how it scores looks like, but it does seem to me that a four-card run should be worth more than just one point extra than a three-card run. But, then again, changing the scoring of these things would change the strategy and play (as you note when you say it might not even be a good idea). I like games with these sorts of idiosyncrasies. But no idea why three and four of a kind got scored by breaking them down to the basic unit of constituent pairs but runs and flushes didn’t.
:smack: I should give you the four points for screwing that up, anyway.
6 points, no more, no less.
Heck, a good hand and a good crib and you can win on the first deal.
Flushes, I can understand, because if you scored a five-card flush as five four-card flushes, you’d be up to 20 points even before you considered 15s and runs.
I think 29 would still be the max, but if I’m counting right, it would add about a hundred ways to get there - flushes of 2-3-4-5-6 through 6-7-8-9-10 in each suit. And that’s if we score runs of 5 in the standard way. But if we scored runs of 5 as triple runs of 3 as well, we’d raise the max to 33, I think. 
Only rule variation my wife and I added–for about a year, then took it out–was we used to score flushes as double points. A 4-card was worth 8, a 5-card worth 10. Flushes seem to come up so rarely that this made it more interesting to keep one when it did come up.
But we got rid of the rule so if we played with others we wouldn’t get all confused.