I think there is an effort to reassess how riders are classified into grades, partially to address these issues. Right now none of the initial classification is done on the horse. So you get people like Pearson who are absurdly talented and could be riding GP and people who cannot ride the level of what the evaluation shows they classify at (they have finally made some para levels to address this, so you don’t have to go right into those long team/indiv. tests!).
There is also a lot of ability creep in general - Sophie Christiansen wrote an article a few years ago about her struggles as a more limited grade 1 trying to keep up internationally when the other grade 1 were objectively less impaired but still within the classification for the grade. Should be interesting to see what they come up with.
