As I noted, the fact you left a negative shows on your record, including your comment and the target’s reply comment, which would be, “Are you nuts, I paid, no reason for this.”

If you do this more than extremely rarely, it’s going to show. But I agree that the question of preemptive negative may need more attention.

Some of those problems are solved by other “obvious” suggestions, such as automatic record of prompt payment for paypal users (or any other payment system willing to provide this data to ebay, ha ha.) Alas, eBay has not done much in that direction.

However, you do make me think of a related flaw, which is attack feedback. You find a seller you hate (ie. one who did a preemptive negative) and you do the same to them. You bid high on an item, and leave immediately neg. Again, this will show up in your record but the problem here is that you can potentially do it with a throwaway account.

This might suggest that blocking feedback reply would only apply to people with a certain feedback rating. That low-feedback users could leave a negative and still get a negative in response, but high-feedback users who leave a negative don’t get a neg in response — but it does go into their count of negatives-left, with comments.