This will make a big difference to the results. And the problem is that it s going to be invalid no matter which way you do it. And when the trivia can swamp the important items, that s invalid. The more dimensions you have, the worse the problem gets. If you change the weights so that the important items are weighted 100 so that the less important ones can t possibly swamp them, you end up with the reverse problem, where the minor considerations will never have an effect.
Trivia are good for tiebreakers, but that s all.
The ideal range for the weights must be determinable in terms of the range of scores and the number of criteria. Even if there was a solution for the range of weights given the number of dimensions of merit, there s another problem. During the synthesis, you change the number of criteria of merit as you do the analysis, and it would be a real pain to have to redo the weights every time. Because we only use methods like this for very important choices which, once made, we have to live with, and so never find out that we would have been better off choosing something else. And we need to go to a weighting scale that s qualitative rather than quantitative.