I probably shouldn't comment since I didn't watch a minute of SURVIVOR: ALL STARS, but since the contestants who hadn't won before made a pact to eliminate the previous winners as soon as possible, I felt the deck was stacked against certain excellent players from the get-go. In fact, as appealing as the idea of an all-star edition sounded when I first heard it, I think Mark Burnett erred horribly by having past winners back on the show. Of course, they were all stars, too, but NO ONE on the jury would have voted them ANOTHER million dollars when they had won before if they had managed to get to the end. He should have realized that. For me, that made the victory of Amber tainted and made the show less compelling than it might have been.
Perhaps if he had waited to do this edition when he had sixteen winners to play against each other, it might have leveled the playing field, but CBS needed a big gimmick to throw against NBC's final season of FRIENDS, and it certainly seemed to work. Ratings for the all star edition were better than for the past three or four editions of the show.