That's going to do the exact opposite of encouraging participating then, especially with the wording of your reply because it pretty much comes across as "just throw (even more of your) money at the problem with how things are coded" if the somewhat likely scenario bigblock990 mentioned happens (pushing the limits does eventually put wear on gear, and/or kill it)... And a lot of benchers aren't putting much money into acquiring new hardware because new stuff is stupidly expensive.
A seasonal ranking should be just that, seasonal. It should pay absolutely no heed to what you did last year, and instead should go "do I have a sub for this THIS year? No, okay, it counts" instead of forcing you to beat your overall/career best, because now you have time-limited rankings, but you're forced to beat your previous best as well. Otherwise it's just two things being calculated that are overall, with one of them valid for an artificially limited timeframe.