  Inspired by Hutchings' elementary alternative to ECH capacities, we introduce
an elementary alternative to spectral invariants defined via periodic Floer
homology (PFH). We use these spectral invariants to provide more elementary
proofs of a number of results which have recently been obtained using PFH
spectral invariants. Among these results are quantitative closing lemmas for
area-preserving surface diffeomorphisms and the simplicity conjecture.
