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Eric BrehmJosh -- I see what you're saying. This brings up an interesting point about how grading scales are actually applied in practice. Since cards rarely have all of the attributes (i.e. defect types) defined for each grade in exact combination together, but rather tend to have a mixture of attributes associated with different grades, should a card's grade be based on its 'average' attribute, or should it be based on its 'worst' attribute?
We have seen the cases where a card with, say, sharp corners that would qualify for NM 7, but also scuffing or slight paper loss on the back that would drop it to a VG 3 at best, is awarded a PSA 5, sort of the average of the two. Perhaps SGC tends to take the more conservative approach of giving more weight to the worst problem in assigning the grade, where a card needs to have all (or nearly all) of the qualities required to get a particular grade, and where goodness of one type is not allowed to compensate for badness of another. Maybe this is part of where SGC's reputation for toughness is coming from.