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Judge Dred (Fred)A lot of people collect encapsulated cards. The "qualifying" designation would basically serve the same purpose as PSA qualifiers such as MK, OC, OF, ST or PD. The MK qualifier would indicate a "mark" on the card. The mark should be obvious but PSA puts the qualifier on the label anyway.
The "qualifying" designation for the AUTHENTIC cards would give an indication of what's wrong. To me this is good because I've seen ebay item descriptions indicate that the AUTHENTIC designation was provided because the card wouldn't meet a certain grade and rather than have the card scrutinized because it has an appearance of a "6" but only rated a "4" the seller stated he opted for the AUTHENTIC designation. To me that was absolute BS (not a PSA qualifier) but you really couldn't debate this reason because there was no "qualifying description" provided for the AUTHENTIC designation. This happened on more than one occassion.
I guess there's always going to be someone out there that will take advantage of a situation so the qualifying designation would be for the protection of the buyers of the card. Scans are difficult to judge but a label indicating the defect is something that can't be masked unless the seller covers up the qualifying designation indicator in the scan for the item description.