So all available reporting says my credit score went down when I paid off my loans and has remained in this new lower state for months since, but the secret real number used to decide my fate maybe didn’t.

There’s no maybe. I already explained how it works. The only part of it that’s ‘secret’ is the minutia of the score tabulation, to make it harder to game. Loans closed in good standing (i.e. you paid them off) are part of your credit report for 10 years.

Get the fuck out of here with that. Credit scores are purely a value used by lenders to determine how much money can be extracted from a consumer.

This is demonstrably bullshit.

Someone who maxes out a credit card, and then only pays minimum payments, and always makes them late, is, via interest accruing and late payment fees, making the lender basically the maximum amount of profit possible. And yet doing this will result in a garbage credit score, because using every penny of your credit limit is very detrimental to your credit score, and not making payments on time is extremely detrimental to your credit score.

Meanwhile, take me, someone who never pays a cent of interest, because he pays off his card every statement cycle (and on time, naturally), and because of card rewards, I’m the one profiting, the lender is literally the one paying me, and ‘yet’, my credit score is in the 800s.

So how do you reconcile that with your assumed truth quoted above? It’s very hard to understand how anyone can arrive at the conclusion you did, while also knowing (as I assume you do) that late payments simultaneously hurt your credit score and increase profit for the lender, just as one example.

It goes down if you’re delinquent

As it should—the whole point of the score is to rate your reliability in repaying what you borrow.

it goes down it you pay things off early without racking up all the interest they wanted

False. You will never be worse off after paying a loan off early than you were before you took out the loan. Again, I haven’t paid a cent of interest on my credit cards in over a decade, and I paid off the only car loan I ever had, really early, less than a year into it.

it goes down if you don’t run enough of a balance on your credit cards.

Also false. Higher utilization is BAD for your credit score, not good. You’re saying literally the opposite of what’s true, do you realize that? You might want to google ‘credit score myths’ and find an article on bankrate or nerdwallet to educate yourself, you’ve been massively misled about this, honestly.

It doesn’t protect consumers

It gets good borrowers like me lower interest rates, and higher credit limits.

it barely protects lenders

Pretty sure the lenders would heavily disagree with that, lol. For very obvious reasons, anyone who’s considering lending someone money is going to be very interested in what happened the last X times that person was lent money.

it’s purely used to determine how much can be extracted from a consumer’s bank account.

Still false the second time.