specifically, defensive rating. There's such a glaring flaw in the definition, it's a bit puzzling to me people even want to use it. So if anybody bases their argument on something silly like that, I'm going to assume they're the ones who don't understand statistics and their potential limitations at all.

imo, you can't really build effective advanced statistics by just crunching the regular stats numbers (like point scored) and re-formulating them a bunch of different ways. I would be much more interested in different approaches collecting data that is not accounted for in regular stats; things like counting the times a player provides effective help defense or forces a bad shot or 'near-blocks' a shot (making the shooter miss, obv).