Yeah, well as we seem to be stating...it's one of those necessary evils.
I certainly would agree that it is not perfect. I don't think a person should be able to send retalatory negative feedback...but how would they ever automate that...no real way that I can think of...
I think that since most of the exchanges on eBay are person to person (rather than business to person) that Feedback becomes exceedingly important. As you say, you need to check people out before you buy.
I personally forgot to take that one step on something I bought recently. The seller had well over 500 feedback and they had better than 98% positive...so I made the purchase. If I would have looked at the feedback first I would have saw that they got a negative on 8 of the last 10 transactions.
The number of negatives kept rising and rising as the days went by... I never did get the item I paid for...did get a refund through PayPal though... Eventaully eBay yanked the sellers account and they are no longer a registered user. Should have spent the 2 minutes to look at the feedback though and it would have saved me a month of waiting for a refund...
I guess that's another reason why Feedback is important to me as a Seller. I want people to look at my feedback and feel comfortable about doing business with me...and IMO it helps if what they see is recent activity...
Mike