2-On 29 Nov 2016 after Taimanov passed away, Kasparov wrote on his Facebook: "I also owe Mark Evgenievich (Taimanov) my own personal happiness. At the beginning of the year 2000, he called and asked me to speak at an event at the Saint Petersburg University of the Humanities. I had no special reason to want to go there, but I could not deny Taimanov! It was there that I met a student named Dasha Tarasova, who later became my wife."

3-On April 4th 2005, the match arbitrator Eric Schiller wrote on chessgames.com: "Anyone who saw Kasparov just before the game knows that he was clearly greatly distracted by a non-chess matter. It was not appropriate for me, as arbiter, to ask why, so I didn't. He left quickly after the game. In many matches, things going on off the board affected some games, not just in Iceland 72. Perhaps Kasparov will write of such things in a future book, covering all of his matches."

4-Also I recall that Judit Polgar had said something to the same effect of Mr. Schiller but I don't remember the source now.

Conclusion:
By putting all above together we can understand with a high percentage of assurance that what was the issue with Kasparov at this match, or at least one of his main issues.

Thanks Beatgiant....I was aware of Kasparov avoiding the qualification process due to hia ego, but never thought all these years that he was ducking Kramnik.

I thought that he would have won the rematch and am sad that it never happened.

"We didn't look at Ruy Lopez: Kramnik almost didn't play it, and I thought that it's too difficult to prepare Spanish and Scotch from scratch. Only in the end of the preparation to match I said: we should look at Berlin Defense. But we didn't do in-depth analysis..."

"...I was shocked by detected holes in my set of openings both as White and as Black right away. I didn't know how to penetrate the Berlin Wall, and didn't want to discover another Kramnik's surprises in Grunfeld. Almost all my opening preparation went down the drain and we had to start it again almost from scratch!"

<Keene writes:

I personally selected Kramnik as the most worthy and dangerous opponent to play Kasparov in 2000. We wanted the best opponent possible for Kasparov. We chose the highest rated opponent, Anand, but he refused, so we went to the next man down on the ratings, Kramnik, who, by the way, overtook Anand in the ratings while the latter was considering whether to play or not. >

Yes and yes:

As World Champion, he barely scraped past Leko and Topalov. His match results have never been as impressive as his tournament victories.

In the first sentence of the RDK quote which saffuna gave you will see RDK agrees with you regarding playing records.

<"I personally selected Kramnik as the most worthy and dangerous opponent to play Kasparov in 2000.">

Regarding ratings, Anand was ahead of Kramnik in October 2000 when the match was played. https://ratings.fide.com/toparc.pht...

Well, that's weird.

Around about that time there was a bit of turmoil going on with two world champions. Ratings were in a muddle. FIDE took away Kasparov's and Short ratings in 1993 so (and I'm guessing) a few of the non-FIDE events Kasparov arranged were never rated.

Chessmetrics (and here I am not guessing) is an unofficial hobby horse, a dedicated labour of love if you will. I'd go with the RDK who organised the whole show over a few prettily coloured pie charts and graphs.

Has Chessmetrics been hacked?

http://www.chessmetrics.com/cm/CM2/...

near the bottom someone has added, mid sentence, a link to buy replica Rolex watches.

Chessmetrics is good in respect that it has people going back to look at the old masters games often out of curiosity because the only time they have seen their name before is when they have been carved up by Capablanca or Alekhine in a famous game and their opinion of the player changes.

Milan Vidmar is a good example. He has appeared as the loser in quite a few best games collections Alekhine, Lasker, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Najdorf, Tartakower...a casual reader might think of him as a mere punching bag when in fact he was a very good player and Chessmetrics draws attention to this. http://www.chessmetrics.com/cm/CM2/...

It is also something that had to be tried and at least the lad doing did it is a qualified statistician and computer buff but more important than that he has the passion for it.