Doesn't bombing more or less always result in some massive autocollect?
You mean in Touhou games in general? They do I suppose, but there's generally been a penalty for using them. PCB, IN, and MoF directly damage your point item value. SA (and MoF) drops your power level so you get power items instead green stars, and has a big clear bonus to discourage suiciding. UFO encourages you not to collect the bombs in the first place, since blue and rainbow UFOs are much better for score. In TD, bombing was a purely rewarding action, so an ideal score run involved bombspamming. DDC likewise has no apparent penalty for bombing. It's only good for you. Though to be fair, the number of them available throughout the game will effect how often you can use them for scoring. As it is they seem extremely plentiful, but ZUN may increase the number of fragments needed, so that's up in the air I guess.
And I guess you can simply choose not to use them if you don't want to, and then in a sense they only "ruin" the scoring if choose to use them that way. I don't think that excuses ZUN's design choices though. Players are going to want to play competitively and all that. The game should be balanced on its own.
edit: cut by a bunch of people. But yeah, you can't really hold back on bombspamming and still play competitively. And then players who are competitive have a lot less to work with when it comes to planning and execution and all that, because the solution to many situations becomes "just bomb."
Making it harder to deathbomb wouldn't balance anything anyway. You're not deathbombing when you bomb for the auto collection, you just bomb when the screen's full of items/bullets. The feature could be removed completely and it would barely effect anything.
another edit:
Actually, to clarify, this isn't super true right now, but if the later stages have more items to collect (like every game in the series so far) it'll be much easier to bombspam for extends and suddenly b-b-b-d-b-b-b-d is a real strategy.
And this, yes. Even survival play is effected when you can use the bombs to easily get life fragments (which is the big deal with MarisaB right now).