I believe the rulebook is the source from some of the confusion. There is a TR track on the perimeter of the game board. During the game, this is used to track each player's TR, and it only increases when a player's TR is increased. TR is one of the 6 components of scoring when the game is complete.
The rulebook suggests, inadvisedly so, in my opinion, that all players then advance their TR markers to add their points from the other 5 sources (greeneries, cities, milestones, awards, and VP from cards). Personally, I prefer a scorepad for this purpose. Why? Well, I like to see the breakdown of points from each of the 6 sources. And, if there is a scoring error or dispute, it will be difficult to analyze or fix once people start moving their physical cube from the spot that marked their TR at the end of the game (before the scoring began).
Additionally, I've seen people say, "I ended up in 2nd place with 68 TR", which seems potentially confusing to me. Is the person saying, "I had 68 points", but is referring to it as "68 TR" because that is where the player marker ended up after moving it for the other 5 scoring categories? Or, was this a long-generation game in which the player's TR was actually 68? Rare as it is, I have seen some very high TR.
To me, TR is TR (Meaning, a player's Terraform Rating before final scoring occurs), and is one of the 6 components of scoring, along with VP from cards, and the 4 other sources of points. I see little reason to confuse things by muddling them all together and sometimes referring to the total as "TR".
But, that's just my personal opinion. To each his own, so to speak.
The main point is, during the game, adding non-TR points to the TR track would incorrectly increase your income by a very large amount.
