I personally didn't care about the Top Rated Seller Program when it was first announced. The requirements are beyond ridiculous. I read a while back that Wal Mart is the leader in customer satisfaction in the retail industry. Their benchmark is 90% customer satisfation. The rest of the retail industry struggles to reach that benchmark. Now eBay says sellers must have a customer satisfation of 99.5% or better to be a Top Rated Seller. What a joke. I would completely disregard the whole thing except eBay added a "show only top rated sellers" option for search results. For some reason eBay thinks it's OK to take sellers money and then provide a way that their listings are never seen.
I lost faith in eBay almost 2 years ago and fortunately I had the good sense to start my own website http://www.rexxindustrialparts.com and it has grown to where I can soon walk away from the insanity that is Ebay.
I would encourage any eBay sellers that have not already set up their own website to do it now.
Some eBay sellers have been taking issue with the fact that they are not being considered "Top Rated Sellers" in eBay's program of that name. As far as they can tell, they meet the requirements, but are having no luck being included in this group.
Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes was able to get a response from eBay on the matter with the following points:
1) All existing PowerSellers who qualify for the program should now see the TRS badge in search results and on their View Item pages.
2) eBay is beginning to invite sellers who would qualify under the new lower-volume requirements into the program. "We began sending invites to join the PowerSeller program this week for non-PowerSellers who otherwise meet Top-rated standards and who sold at least 100 items to U.S. buyers with a GMV of at least $3k in the past 12 months," he said.

Judging from the comments, the response didn't do a whole lot to make eBayers feel better. They start with:
"I only have one big question...WHY? For many years now Ebay management has thought that pitting seller against seller is a good thing. We're all paying Ebay for exposure to SELL our wares. Nobody informed us that this is some kind of competition - with small sellers always on the bottom of the pile but paying the same!"
The AuctionBytes post points to a couple of pages that contain information on requirements. This one provides a chart of "at-a-glance" requirements and rewards (pictured above) and this one gives examples of calculating low DSRs (Detailed Seller Ratings).
Top rated sellers program
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Ebays Fixed Game Programs!
Selling on ebay for years has become a total time waster! Ebay sellers should not give a care to the "TOP RATED SELLER" program but should turn the attention to the "FIXED & RIGGED SEARCH" called best match!!!! Just go look where you fair when searching for your items. You can have more even then the competetion yet they show on the first pages relegating you to the other pages behind them. Ebay will constantly favor sellers with less then favorable track records but pay more listing more items in fee each month. We all DESERVE equal representation in the search but this just is not so with the Malicious Scripts they now run in the search results. They have covered themselves well using DSR, and TRS and item popularity to cover the FILTHY LIE, and protect from class action or any other complaint! NICE HUH????? Just a Rigged Dice Game now it is, and Just a prayer someone will stumble on your item and actually buy. Doubt this? Look to your hits. Mine have declined 60%+ over a 2 year period. Thanks Jeff King! Thanks so very much for being able to con and cheat what should be a normal search engine result. Bitter? You should be..............