Nofollow was a solution to spam on forums and comment pages (which didn't solve any problem for forums or blogs, since people spam nofollow ones regardless, but it solves a problem for search engines trying to decide which links on a blog were hand-placed with a minimum of work). It isn't obvious to me that everybody on the Internet should necessarily be up on current best practices for solving Google's problems, because most people do not put links into their web pages for the purpose of improving your link graph.
Nofollow was introduced in January 2005, so it's been around for a while. While the first wide-scale deployment was on blog comments and similar content management systems, it was always a general mechanism that Google respected. In fact, the very first nofollow links on the web were not placed on a blog or a forum. They were on my school home page. I put them there for testing in late 2004--they're still there, in fact.
In this instance, if someone is running a consumer complaint site that is going to be linking to a bunch of semi-scuzzy businesses, it's reasonable for that specific niche of sites to ask themselves whether they want to add rel=nofollow on the links to the businesses that are being complained about.
I suspect those using questionable SEO methods will always be one step ahead of algorithms, sure they take the risk of being identified and banned manually.
In this case a bit of user education would go a long way, I don't just buy off random sites without checking them up online or getting a recommendation from someone I know.
