Round 3 you can't. Valentin won that all day. Round 1 though... I think you have to remember that "significant strike" is an effectively meaningless term at the end of the day. It's just something that the UFC statisticians come up with and arbitrarily decide on in the moment. It has no bearing on scoring.
People forget that techniques are scored by their impactful results. What impactful results did Valentin achieve with his strikes in Rounds 1 and 2? Sure, Finney didn't really mount attacks from his takedowns, but at least he effectively neutered his opponent's offense and dictated the pace & location at which the fight took place whilst achieving advantageous positions... that sounds like nominally "Effective Grappling", albeit the most absolutely low-level and boring style of such.
If Valentin had been splitting Finney open from the bottom with elbows or rocking him with upkicks/hammerfists or something, absolutely give him those fucking rounds. But the fact that he nominally landed X amount more (utterly ineffective) strikes because a spreadsheet tells us he did and thus did "MOAR DAMAGE" is a pretty silly way of determining that he won a fight IMO... it's ironically dragging the dreaded CompuBox logic of Tony Weeks' beloved sport into the UFC.
In addition, it's pretty well-established that when nothing much happens in the Effective Striking/Grappling or when the two are about equal, you go to the secondary and then tertiary scoring criteria of Effective Aggression followed thereafter by Octagon Control. I guess you could make an argument that Valentin was "more aggressive" because he was throwing more strikes and these had more chance to create an opening to finish the fight, but I don't think that holds water because Finney had all the forward pressure, executed a high-amplitude slam or two (something we have seen have fight-finishing implications), and again the qualifier is effective while Robert's strikes in Round 1 were anything but. Once you get to Octagon Control it's no contest, all Finney.
Furthermore, things like Dominance & Duration are part of the scoring metrics. Dominance explicitly states that you look for a fighter to set up impactful strikes/submission attacks from dominant positions rather than simply holding said positions, but then goes on to state that this is merely the primary thing a judge should be looking for and that a fighter can still assert Dominance in an MMA scoring context by consistently keeping their opponent in a "defensive or reactive mode" through constant positional changes. Finney more or less did that in Round 1 with his mat returns. This isn't even mentioning Duration, which states that the time spent "effectively attacking, controlling, or impacting one's opponent" is part of the scoring criteria.
At the end of the day, a big part of me expected this to happen after Valentin got fucked up by Loder. I picked Rob to win on a hunch and was sort of rooting for him, but I don't feel like he did. The guy got smushed for 10 minutes. I don't mind giving him Round 1 and you can certainly make an argument for doing so... but I don't think that those strikes he was landing were sufficiently "impactful and effective" to make up for getting tossed around like an unruly child and pancaked against the cage for minutes at a time. Especially since "cumulative impact" is a thing per the Rules, getting mat-returned hurts, and having your energy reserves sapped by what the other guy is doing to you is also scoreable.
