After trying out Scott Craner's solution to the dense rank problem (ranking without skipping any ranks) I found it still skipped ranks on the test data I used, just differently. The more common sumproduct/countif worked, but I really liked Scott's solution for handling unbounded data. So I sliced his index(match) solution into the sumproduct/countif method, and it works! Though I'm still puzzled why Scott's version didn't quite succeed with my data? I'd like to know if anyone can point out where things went wrong. And maybe double-check my Frankenstein creation?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oafrvsGo9MhGdWLE-xWKm79-lXmxTuVGpXWaQ9c7Nyk/edit?usp=sharing