It's absolutely relevant. Innocent until proven guilty. Account hacked? Someone lying about what they saw? Misinterpreting someone's poor judgement (like uploading their own customized bitcoinQT binary and not letting anyone see the source) for scamming? Humans and our opinions are flawed, this is why the legal system has a court to try and examine it before making a ruling. Allowing non-connected people to make their own rulings is silly and disingenuous and only leads to libel and slander. Your argument has been invalidated, you'd be wasting your time to repeat it.
Let me go through each of your case for you:
"Innocent until proven guilty": Which is why people generally leave feedback when anyone who sees the evidence will go "guilty".
You deciding they are guilty is not the same thing as them actually being guilty. There are people who think I am 'guilty' of many things that I know I am not. Should these personal opinions of people completely unrelated and biased to me be printed in bright red on my trust page as if they had legitimacy? Shouldn't they be comments on the same page instead, that don't give positive or negative ratings, and allow responses from me for clarification and correction to anyone reading? You sound like the kind of person who thinks that all people in prison must be criminals and that you're free from being mistakenly convicted too, something typical with people until it happens to them.
"Account hacked": Wouldn't it be a good idea to prevent the hacker from scamming more people?
The account has been reclaimed, and the feedback is not removed, and cannot be petitioned for removal, so now this person has feedback intended for the hacker permanently stuck to their account? Rebuttals and petition for removal are elementary for ratings/feedback systems. This system is broken for that reason alone.
"Someone lying about what they saw": That can be true. That's why I only left neg feedback after seeing forum posts by Canadian.
It has already been proven to be true on numerous occasions, you are disingenuous to pretend that it is not already an epidemic. There are people blackmailing as a business now for removal of admittedly false negative ratings. Forum posts from CanadianGuy himself don't make him guilty. It is not your place to decide, a moderator should have that responsibility, as a moderator has the responsibility of giving a scammer tag too. Either all or nothing here.
"Poor judgement": Sure. When you have a file named "Bitcoin Stealer.exe" and is flagged by VirusTotal, I'd say that's damn well guilty.
Strawman. I said BitcoinQT without source code. You have yet to respond to that example, and instead used an extreme example to pretend that it's okay to make judgement to those of whom you have no evidence of their wrongdoing. Shame on you.
Your point of view is that people could leave incorrect feedback, which is obviously true and undeniable.
Thank you. Fix it Theymos.
The argument that because it involves humans, it's broken and needs to be reworked, isn't valid.
That's not my argument. My argument is that decisions on whom is a scammer, should be made by moderators, not disconnected third parties who love to jump to conclusions. Comments are fine, and rebuttals are ELEMENTARY TO ANY FEEDBACK SYSTEM. That is the point here, and that is why it's broken. Theymos, FIX IT.
✓ Yes. Feedback can be incorrect. This can affect people in a negative way, especially if the feedback is "trusted".
There is already a solution to this.. [you or whoever manages the list] removing people who leave incorrect feedback from your trusted list.
That does not remove the negative feedback, allow them to leave a rebuttal for fraudulent feedback, nor allow them to petition it for removal. Stop defending and arguing the basics of why people get feedback; no one is confused about that. We're wondering why Theymos (and those who continue to defend his current implementation) seem to not care at all about how to do it properly.