I don’t think reviews should be mandatory, but I do think they should be encouraged to some degree. There should be reviews of some kind, it makes sense to have them but seems odd to take them away. I can understand if they were removed due to spammers blasting stuff all over the place, but it would be an easy fix to make them work the way the rating stars work and only allow purchasers to leave reviews. Of course the way it was they were more like comments than an actual review of the product in most cases.