I agree, they made this game much much better than last years. They designed it to completely remove defense from the strategy. We used to think having 2 scoreres and a defensive bot was the way to win, but 3 scorers is way better.
Playing defense just wastes time and takes away from the number of people your alliance has scoring, while not necessarily taking away from their scoring abilities.
Some of our better strategies in the elims at Detroit were to force the other teams to score so they would not try and defend us. Since we could outscore them, there was no stopping us in any way. (We didn't lose a single elim match because of this... only tied once
)