devilkitty
To provide a bit of a counterpoint... Thinking about it, if a quint is supposed to be a summary of the natures of all the cards on the table, it's already ignoring a huge influence - that is, the suits. Suits can of course drastically change an idea of the overall energy, like the 10 of Cups vs the 10 of Wands. If you instead view the quint as a summation of the numerical information each card has, then it makes sense in a way to leave out the courts, rather than attributing extra numbers to them that are rather tacked-on. Or, perhaps to use the 10/6/3/2 idea, which stands out as a good option to me. (Although I wonder if you'd want to use the path numbers for the majors instead, to keep the method internally consistent?)
I first encountered the idea of the "quintessence card" many years ago in Oswald Wirth's Tarot of the Magicians, and I would point out that if one reads trumps only, (as is the practice in certain spheres - continental and TdM, for example), the matter of the suits and numeration of the courts becomes moot.