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Sorry, but what is the difference here? Playing strength does not mean playing strength during a tournament, it means (in common parlance) the normal or average playing strength of a Go player. It does not mean the tournament performance strength or average playing strength during the tournament. The strongest player has a higher playing strength. So I don't really see the difference in these two points. Apparantly there is a subtle difference. :p
Suppose you have four tied players, and a choice of two tie breakers:
Tie breaker A is 99% likely to correctly identify the strongest player, but places 2-4 will be pretty much random.
Tie breaker B is 80% likely to find the fully correct ranking for places 1-4, but in 20% of cases it will be wrong and be pretty much random.
Which on do you prefer?
I prefer amalgamation to the below, since we are basically looking at a subset. It seems incorrect to say playing strength when you are talking about tournament performance strength. I mean, how exactly can you tell if one player has flu from a tiebreaker? If you must make a distinction then you should try to use the same wording in both.
The answer is tie breaker one. Because tie breaking is only necessary for undividable winner prizes (sometimes), the rest can stay tied.
Regards...
PS If everyone formulates the quality criteria that way his preferred tie breaker looks best than the list will be useless.