Right! That and hitting the breaks when some yoyo swoops close in front of us and then slams on his breaks.
The support documentation says that Hard Breaking is when the forward deceleration exceeds a certain limit. But that is hard for us to measure. I have been able to avoid this ding by using only regenerative breaking, no break pedal except occasional very gently. I do wonder if regen breaking on an uphill road would exceed the limit, but I hesitate to test it because it would hurt my score.
One trick to mitigate the Hard Breaking ding: The daily breaking score is the percentage of breaking during that day which is hard breaking. So, if you do have to hit the breaks hard, you can go for a drive and do a bunch of gentle breaking to dilute the ding and improve your score for that day. Best is a county road with little traffic, speed up to say 60, and then use regeneration to slow down to 20, over and over. It would infuriate anyone behind you, so pull over and let them pass.
Similarly, a hard turn or close following can be diluted. It has to be done the same day. When my wife got dinged one day while rushing to a doctor's appointment, I checked our score for the day and it was 81 due to a trifecta of Forward Colission Warning, Hard Breaking and Unsafe Following. All are percentages. So I went out to add miles (dilutes FCW), did the breaking thing, and on the freeway I counted seconds between me and the car I was following. I got our score for the day up to 91 which had much less impact on our overall average than 81 would have. It helps to have an Excel spreadsheet to log the daily details and cumulative score, and to compute the counter effects of potential dilution driving so I know how many miles to put on. Since the times spent following, breaking and turning are not displayed, I often stop midway through my corrective drive and check to see which elements need more work to reach the goal I set using the spreadsheet. This way I get to include my computer in the game, all the more fun!
To your bigger point about SS being silly, yes it is! I often (when it looks safe) roll a bit past stop signs, especially those at the bottom of a hill where regen doesn't quite get the car stopped in time. That is not the Safe or legal way to drive.
On the other hand, playing this real-life computer game in the real world does train us to pay very close attention to how we and Auto Pilot drive as well as the other drivers around us. Given that FSD Beta reportedly can and does occasionally do the wrong thing at the worst time, training us up on hyper attentive driving is probably a good idea. Silly, yes, but probably good for Tesla and us.
Our average score, by the way, just inched up from 98 to 99. According to my spread sheet, our average is really 98.52, which Tesla rounds up to 99. To get up to 100 (99.52 to be precise), we'd need 2,000 miles of 100's. But that day of 91 was on the first of the month, so it will drop out of consideration in a few days reducing that down to 600 more miles.
SW