And with that, I am out of the grading game.

[Snapolit1]

If grading isn't your thing, you shouldn't care on whit that other people feel differently. Seems like most of the people who rail about card grading claim not to even use it. Which is odd. If it's not your bag, it's not your bag.

I have both raw and graded. While the grading model has sort of collapsed onto itself because of a backlog of many millions of largely modern shiny cards, I'm not morally offended by the idea. I'm sure most hobbies have some equivalent where some third party passes judgment on the authenticity and perceived quality of different items. Are they infallible? Of course not. Is it necessary to enjoy an item? Of course not. I'm also sure as long as people have been collecting items for 1000s of years, there is always a part of the collector world that aspires to have the "best" of "nearly best" example of something as judged by others. Some dude in Ancient Egypt was probably setting up outside the pyramids grading wooden funeral figures on a scale of 1 to 10.