I may be showing my age a bit with this post, but I've been on eBay long enough to remember the days when eBay actually used to be a good site to use. (OK, stop laughing, believe it or not, eBay actually used to be a decent site many years ago, before the staff at eBay Towers lost their marbles and started ruining the site with a vengeance!) Until about three years ago eBay only had a very basic feedback system anyway - you could only leave replies containing a maximum of eighty characters, although they ended up increasing that to five hundred. eBay aren't in the habit of revoking changes made to the site, so why they would want to revoke this one is beyond me, unless it has occurred to them that the majority of site users have actually been finding the change to the maximum amount of characters you can leave in feedback to be advantageous.
As far as the subject of what to do with the feedback system is concerned, I'm inclined to agree with what has already been said on this thread with regards to the fact that the eBay feedback system is not fit for purpose. The reason I say this is because eBay allow buyers to leave positive, neutral or negative feedback for sellers, yet if sellers receive feedback that isn't positive eBay forbid them from leaving truthful negative feedback for the buyer to reflect their own side of the story! I really do think that eBay need to do one of two things as far as the feedback system is concerned - either alter the feedback system so as to create a level playing field and allow sellers to post neutral or negative feedback for troublesome buyers so that both sides of the story can be told, or alternatively, just get rid of the feedback system in its entirety.
Given the fact that there isn't much of this site left that eBay haven't already irreparably ruined it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if eBay continue to introduce a whole host of new problems and exacerbate the existing problems to such an extent that this site eventually becomes more hassle than it's worth to use, in which case I suspect that many buyers and sellers will end up taking their business elsewhere, having made the decision to close their accounts down for good.
