Ebalog - I found particularly cogent your comments about reviews and reviewing. Permit me to add to them based on my own experience.
1. The best reviews are those whose authors approach them as an expository rather than an editorial activity.
2. You don't need jewel encrusted cochlea to be a reviewer, but you do need the ability to reflect on your own awareness of sonic phenomena and put those reflexions into words in a way that communicates them to others.
3. A reviewer needs a reasonably descriptive vocabulary for assessing sound - one that he is willing to be accountable to over time. This can take some real work and sometimes separates the casual forum commentator from the rigors of formal reviewing. (Whatever else you may think of him, Harry Pearson has done seminal work here, both in developing a vocabulary and educating readers in its meaning.) Describing a component as, for example, 'musical' doesn't impart much information to a reader.
A shared vocabulary gives us a start on validating our experience in a common world. I'm unwilling to presume I communicate effectively all the time. Therefore, seeking validation from others about my "opinions" (my words describing what I hear) is not (for me anyway) a shortcoming but a means for improving my descriptions both to them and to myself about what it is I perceive.
4. Any review worth its salt will explicitly reference the music on which its sonic comments are based. "In the opening bars of 'The Storm', the fourth movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, as performed by The Berlin Philharmonic with Andre Cluytens (EMI ALP XXX), I heard .......". This at least provides the reader an opportunity to use the same source material and gauge the extent to which their percepts match the reviewer's, regardless of system or room differences.
5. Fwiw, I've never known a reviewer who has not urged his reader to listen for himself.
If "valid" means cogent or efficacious or based on sound reasoning, the fact that everyone can have an opinion does not rank each equally valid. When someone regularly describes components that I've heard in terms that I understand and can agree with, I'm more likely to accept what they say about a component I have not heard.
Across the years, the marketplace of audiophile opinion has conferred a certain authority to Mr. Fremer's reviews. This does not mean everyone always concurs with his written descriptions of what he hears, but in general many do and many have found his views helpful. Personally I think the analog community would be lesser in his absence.
Tim