"Conspiracy theories" aside, the beef that most of us have with CA is not the fact they they don't like our favorite cigars (that's just fanboyism). It's that their method for "rating" is utter crap.
They literally smoke 1" of the cigars, that's fact not rumor. Last year sometime they actually defend this practice, saying 2 things (I'll paraphrase):
1) "If a cigar is a dog turd after 1", it won't miraculously become a great cigar if you keep smoking it."
--No $&^t. What a ridiculous and pompous response! No one cares about dog turds, we care about the good cigars! If you give a cigar a 90 rating for the first inch and then it tanks after that, is it really a 90 cigar? If you give a cigar a 90 rating after the first inch and then it becomes better in the 2nd third, and then tremendous in the final third, is that really only a 90 cigar?
We've ALL experienced this ... cigars that start out great then fizzle out and cigars that start out great only to get better and better. We've all had a great cigar turn bitter and nasty in the final third. How good a cigar is depends a LOT on how it smokes for the whole stick. Smoking only an inch is ridiculous when you're looking at the truly good cigars. At the very least they should only do that 1" thing in their first round of ratings.
2) "We simply don't have enough tasters to do our process with the entire cigars."
--That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Seriously. The name of your magazine is "CIGAR 'effing Aficionado" and you can't find the time to do the one thing you exist for? Then you should all quit your jobs, not just half-@$$ your way through it.
The simply answer is that CA is irrelevant to my life, and I buy more cigars than 99% of the CA readership. But the "industry" as a whole still relies heavily on CA's ratings, which I think is a shame. I think good shops should rate their own stock. I think we should all do a better job of telling cigar smokers how CA is utter crap--or demanding that they improve their tasting methods.
Fortunately, I think most of us hard-core cigar guys pay a lot more attention to forums and bloggers than to CA, which I think is a good thing.
/endrant