I agree on pretty much everything you said (especially wrt: selling.. if you're not a medium-ish business with that as your function, you need your head examined if you decide to roll with ebay!)

That said, the whole "excessive shipping" thing is primarily used by unscrupulous sellers to skirt around ebay's fees. It also used to be used to appear higher in search results when sorted by price, until they started including shipping in that column. It's the reason you see a small widget like a laser pointer for a penny with 9.99 shipping.

You can report any listings like that and they'll get yanked for it.

And there's the little fact that the world's worst auction site and the world's worst payment provider are surgically joined at the hip..