Art Critiquing - Lists, their benefits and drawbacks

I was recently pointed to a post on the First Things blog about an article in the Wall Street Journal about a list published in L’ Osservatore Romano (it's amazing how these things come to our attention!) It details a list of the 10 greatest rock and pop albums of all time. It is one of those posts where the comments are more interesting than the actual post itself (which may be its intended point.) It is amazing the passions that come out when people discuss rock music, including defending different artists and hating the genre completely. The LOR's is missing any justification for their picks and a great deal of their selections are wrong anyway :) (they did offer a justification for why they didn't pick Bob Dylan but it is, quite frankly, a dumb reason.)
However I became interested in the idea of listing the top ten rock albums, and more generally our desire to put everything in neat tidy hierarchical and definitive lists. Lists in music (and art in general) are a way in which we attempt to make sense of our own vague and often inexpressible taste of the sublime and the beautiful. Unfortunately because our tastes are unquantifiable in a definitive scientific way (this is not to say that our tastes have value (in the economic sense) that can be compared it, but rather that we have no way of independently confirming the accuracy of such values.) Because of this most lists concerning the arts are invariably flawed. That is not to say they don't have value to the individual and in the same way they posses critical value the way any other criticism does. However there is, it seems to me, lists that are of more use then others. For example search google for top 500 classic rock songs, there are many to be found (I have attempted to create some myself) and if you try to read a few at some point you will realize a couple of things: first many of them are similar in the sense that the same songs appear over and over again in different arrangements, this is because in order to give their lists "legitimacy" they often include tangible statistics in the construction of the lists (amount of radio play, chart positions), the second realization is that after about 10 entries or so the list begins to blur together, this stems from the limitation of the human mind, while we can compare and contrast vast amounts of data in a general sense (good songs, great songs, bad songs) we general can do so in a fine exact sense. This means that as one creates a list the differences between say entry 51 and entry 52 are slight, to the point of being non-existent. Essentially after a while the list fails to function as a true quantitative analysis and instead would achieve the same affect (and be easier to read) if sorted alphabetically.
The reason the first 10 or so entries often exhibit meaningful analysis or criticism while the rest don't (or offer diminishing returns exponentially) is for, as mentioned above, the limitations of the human mind. We generally can make a meaningful list with 10 entries because of two things, their is less data involved (our feelings and values of 10 entries is easy to get a hand on) and because we spend a much more time (perhaps without being aware of it) thinking about and critiquing our favorite art then others that don't move or affect us as much. In the end, it seems, we will always make (or at least try) lists and often they will contain insight into our own tastes and if they lack critical insight they often are helpful in other ways (I discovered a great many artists and songs by getting a list of 2000 rock songs and downloading each one), but we must remember to keep in mind the weaknesses that list posses from a critical standpoint.