Hunting for the Critic badge

Question

Some features on TeX.SX are time-dependent. For example, voting and comment editing. The bronze critic badge, however, does not fall under such time constraints. It is awarded immediately after you issue your

However, reversing this down vote (within the given time limit) does not reverse the awarded badge. Even the reputation loss from down voting an answer/question on TeX.SX is recovered within the time limit.

Now, perhaps this post doesn't matter at all, since

1. It's just a bronze badge; who cares.
2. Everyone without this badge will try this down vote reversal to still "stay neutral/positive on their voting", but have a +1 in the badge department.

Both points, I guess, are valid, since some badges are awarded by default for just forming part of the TeX.SX community (like posting your first question, answering your first question, up-voting, etc). Also, even the bronze badge description states the obvious, and somewhat verifies point (1) above:

However, does this possible "loop hole" constitute "basic use of TeX - LaTeX - Stack Exchange"?

_{I mention/reference TeX.SX and meta intermittently since I presume this is common across all StackExchange sites. I may be wrong, since I didn't go hunting myself. :-/}

Answer 1

It by design, since awarded badges will not be removed, with rare exceptions. Hendrik's link to "Is the Critic badge badge awarded prematurely?" shows further explanation specifically for the Critic badge.

So once you earned the Critic badge by a downvote, it's intended to stay even if you reverse it.

Answer 2

OK, it is intended, but why? And even in that case it could be changed:

I know this badge is trivial, but so is making it work right, so why not do so? It appears that the application of this badge is currently controlled by a flag that gets set to true the first time a down vote button is clicked. It can never be set back to false even if the user immediately undoes their down vote. Do away with this flag and have the code that checks for application of this badge examine the down vote count instead. (Is the Critic badge awarded prematurely)