Evaluation factors would be technical excellence, management capability (might need to leave that one out), and personnel qualifications. Past performance is being reviewed by the contracting office on a pass/fail basis.
Your second point is our concern - we have a small number of established partners that make up the offeror pool, but technical approaches (due to what we buy) are not necessarily giveaways for the the evaluators.
My CO was looking for best practices' tips for the entire process, e.g. does it work better if we ask offerors to withhold all identifying info, redact certain parts, if we ask offerors to register and then we assign names to use in the proposal. If we use this approach, what's the cleanest way to do it (also for offerors who haven't been asked to do this before).
References would be checked by the CO's office, not by the evaluation committee. The problem is we have a small pool of offerors that our CORs know well, so we're trying to remove favoritism or preferences for certain offerors.