Different tobacco tastes different. Describing taste - whether food, drink, or smoke - in some standardized way seems desirable to me. There are mappings of terms to the spectrum of taste all over the Internet - the Blind Mega-review used one. One could use a scale (also used in the Mega-review), e.g., How sweet from 1 to 5.

As for CA and the cigar boom, I think Shanken was lucky - and seized the day. There was a general boom in luxury goods in those years, and cigars were part of that. Yes, CA was able to harness newcomers' blind faith in numeric ratings into incredible power for itself in the industry, but that is entrepreneurship.

The boom is over. CA is still with us, but is ignorable in many respects now, thanks in part due to forums like this.