Movin' right along

I have finished the first major edit of my main essay, and the first drafts of the various smaller essays for the various supplements. Now begins the arduous process of editing and reviewing my application. This will probably take the rest of the day and beyond, as I still need to meet with my counselor at school.
More and more, I am thinking about the philosophy of the Common App. And more and more I am disliking the supplement process. Some people criticize the Common App by saying that it allows people to apply “too easily”, by simply adding a school to the list. While it’s true that it makes it easy to apply somewhere, these people are missing the point; by freeing students from having to worry about the particulars of an application and whether or not they can complete it, they are left to think about whether or not it is a place they actually want to apply, rather than a place that they can apply.
Ideally, students could apply only to the places they were interested in, rather than having this elaborate system of various admission deadlines and early action policies and safety schools and the like. People would end up only applying to a few schools, which they would be much more likely to get into, because everyone else would have applied to less schools as well, and they would then be free to go where they really wanted to. Invariably, there would still be competition around institutions with better reputations, but it would be legitimate competition, not the kind of artificially constructed competition that surrounds the process now.