The core question always has been: Is the at the time existing ranking system (if one exists) a fair representation of the actual year long performance. We see it today. Overall we have a pretty fair representation with the point race and the rolling ranking system. And a pretty solid hierarchy of tournaments: slams, Masters, 500 and 250 tournaments. We can however discuss, if they should give more points for slams, say 3000 instead of 2000 points, and so on. In the last years, there were huge ranking problems due to Covid and political reasons, with big impacts on the actual ranking. That the ATP didn't count Wim points for 2022, is a big problem. The frozen Covid rankings also were very problematic.
In a historical perspective: Until the 1980s, no really representative points ranking system existed. In the pro era, some internal rankings may have existed, but they were never exactly kept or published. Good researchers like No Mercy, Krosero, Chris Jordan or Scott Tennis dug out old paper findings to reconstruct those forgotten pro tours better. The state of organization of the pro game was very, very poor. For some time after Kramer, whose record books were kept by his grandma (no joke), players like Trabert, Sedgman and Rosewall operated as chief executives of the pro tour. When the lawyer Wally Dill in 1966 took over the pro organization, he lamented about the poor, non-existing institutional state of the whole pro game. This poor and chaotic state also ruled the scene in the early open era until the mid 1980s.
We should not overrate the computer ranking since late 1973 until say the mid 1980s, it was invented for the seeding process in a tournament, as a helping instrument for tournament directors all over the world. In the 1970s, the top players cared much more about Paper rankings, by Tingay, Bellamy, World Tennis or Tennis magazine. The most objective and representative ranking list was the prize money winners list. The ATP Computer list in the 1970s had so many flaws, it was operated by 2-3 people in a small room in Ponte Vedra, sometimes with notes by hand and many bad calculations. It excluded for political reasons (ATP was a Players Union) many important events, which would never be ignored today. And the average system favored the players, who played less. A loss counted more than a win., There was no regulation of a certain number of requested events (much later, in the late 1980s, a 14 requested events rule was established). And the rivalling circuits and promoters made things difficult and intransparent.
