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Posted By: boxingcardman

No. It is collectors who are broken. Collectors who substitute a third party opinion for their own education, experience and learning. Collectors who collect a number on a flip rather than the card in the holder. Collectors who continue to accept the word of one "prophet" or another about the relative quality of cards that are indistinguishable to the collector's naked eye. When we invest near supernatural belief in a grading service and grant talismanic effect to the embodiment of another fallible human's opinion, we declare ourselves unthinking creatures. The issue is not whether the "system" is broken; it is what we can do to avoid depending so heavily on a system that at its core is nothing more than another person's opinion.

Card grading should never be used as a substitute for intelligence, judgment and skill but should instead ideally function as an additional tool to supplement a collector's experienced and appreciative eye, as a means of resolving disputes over a card grade via a disinterested third party opinion, and as a means of ensuring to some extent that a card generally grades about what the advertisement says it does.