Core Staff, plus Jesse, Greg, and Ben Card have awesome reviews, I enjoy them, at least.
And as a budding, aspiring writer who has no chance of ever getting into the industry at all, I can appreciate good and bad criticism. Yeah, there haven't been bad games lately that deserve an F, but at the same time there have been few games that really deserve an F lately. Ok, Dynasty Warriors Gundam maybe....but has anything really been atrocious lately?
Plus, because of the economy and Crave, they get little money out for games after the fact, so they are basically doing marquee titles on the day it comes out so that they get paid, plus previews. The member reviews and the contributing writers basically are picking up the slack then.
So yeah, it's not as bad as your making it, at least to me.