Reality Check?
I've been seeing a lot of similar posts on this sub and other related communities about grading outcomes recently and I feel like it might be helpful for the many frustrated people who are new to the hobby / grading for me to provide my perspective as a nerd who's been doing this close to a decade.
There's a million reasons why people get cards graded, but for the increasing amount of us who submit cards with the goal of getting 10s to increase a card's value / take profits on a card, who are absolutely fastidious with pre-grading their modern cards, and who only send in cards that they are overwhelmingly confident are likely to get 10s, still get a whole lot of 9s.
Yes, it really sucks to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a big submission and have a fraction of your cards come back 10s. Yes, clearly PSA has gotten far stricter on their grading in recent years and have been making some wild calls on which cards gem and which don't. That's why it's absolutely vital that you factor this risk into the potential reward.
If your goal is to profit, and the minority of your cards that are getting 10s aren't making up for the ever-increasing investment of money and time spent to get them graded, maybe you shouldn't be getting cards graded.
If your goal is to profit, and you're missing flaws that are obvious to us nerds who have been in the game for a while that prevent your cards from getting 10s, maybe you shouldn't be getting cards graded.
My hope is that at least one person reads this and evaluates their outlook on why they're getting cards graded and what they should expect from getting into this sub-culture of collecting.
tl;dr There are countless valid criticisms of PSA, but if you're frequently frustrated that your submissions come back smelling like absolute dog shit, at some point you have to check under your own shoes.