Just a rant about credit scores

I have always had great credit. I have long account history, varied credit, multiple cards, never made a late payment. Well yesterday I was thrilled to pay a card off completely. When I got an alert from experian, I was excited thinking my score went up. WRONG. With nothing else changing, no inquiries, no new purchases, just extra payments on all my cards and completely paying off one card, my score went DOWN 12 points. My husband had the same exact situation happen and all we have been doings is throwing cash at our tiny amount of debt. We have both decided to be done with the system and pay everything off and live with cash. It’s sad that we have worked to hard to be low risk to creditors only to have them punish us for paying off cards.

If anyone has ANY advice on what we could be doing wrong (we have already googled, consulted my dad who’s a CPA and my MIL who has her own financial company and both have no answers other than our system is a wreck and creditors love us to be in debt). Disappointed, sad, and furious.