Have you noticed that the players on this version seem to have learned from the mistakes of the previous version, where the tribes immediately voted off all their young and strong players, not realizing that they were exactly the people they needed to win the team challenges. This time, the voting seems to be targeting the weakest links, which is how it should be. Start voting off the stronger ones after the merge, whenever you get the chance.
On the other hand, the tribe that keeps losing ICs isn’t a mixed-age tribe. The reason they were voting out all the young, strong people in Vanuatu was because the older men were in “save our asses” mode from Day One, and corralled enough of their not-cool-kid tribemembers into voting with them to get rid of what is one of the more dangerous blocs intratribally on this game.
The only way it would make sense to intentionally throw a challenge would be in a bizarre set-up like the Africa series. You had a situation where a team that had a pretty solid alliance got broken up by a tribe shuffle. But they maintained the allegiance to their original tribe. So you had a “tribe” where three players belonged to the original tribe and two players belonged to the other tribe. In that situation it made sense to throw a challenge and use the temporary majority to eliminate a player from the other tribe. If they had beaten the “other” team they would have caused a member of their “real” tribe to get voted off.
A similar thing happened on the previous men vs women series (Amazon). I think it was sexist assumptions on the men’s part. They were thinking they had such a physical superiority over the women they didn’t need to worry about sacrificing their strongest players - they were thinking even the average men could beat the women. So they focused on the future competition from the stronger men rather than worry about the immediate competition from the women.
Yeah, and how they all obviously practiced lighting fires and fishing and foraging for edible plants… yeah, that’s working real well…,
[nitpick]
It’s spelled Sook Jai per CBS.
[/nitpick]
Damn Pringles with their Survivor trivia questions!
Yeah, I realized that after I hit “Submit” but figured since the questioner hadn’t seen that season, he’d never know it was spelled wrong. 
Just say you were setting me up for my “SUK THIS!” joke! 