Jay -- you don't even listen. You just take my response as an excuse to get up on your soapbox about opinion vs. absolute values.

Of course I agree that it's all opinion, but just as it's Darius' every right to post his, it's my right to call him out on it. An anti-opinion is just as valid as an opinion, because it's just another opinion phrased contrarily.

And you keep taking the time to criticize the lists and seem to lump me in with them about speed and number of notes in a minimum of time -- I never said that and I don't agree with it (cf. my David Gilmour reference) -- Malmsteen would never be on my list. I completely understand that that criteria isn't a good one, but that doesn't render all or any other criteria meaningless. I mean, if I really wanted to piss people off, I'd put William Hung on the list -- he doesn't even play guitar. You'd have to agree that there are people who don't belong on the list -- William Hung, Christina Aguilera, Winston Churchill, Dubya, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky -- I hope you see my point. There are some criteria that many and most people are going to agree with, especially anyone with any care of rock'n'roll.

Darius is entitled to his opinion. However, using pure opinion like that makes it a different list. Just waving your hands and saying that it's all opinion doesn't mean that you can make the list from public opinion -- I don't trust public opinion for exactly the attitude that Darius represented. But there are still "better" and "worse" guitarists. Where does that leave us? It just means the list is unknowable, and will be different for everyone. But there will be some consensus, especially amongst people who don't have ulterior motives for placing certain guitarists above or below other guitarists.

I need to keep this short, so I'm not going to respond to some of your other points -- if there are key ones you'd like to see my answer to specifically, please feel free to point them out.

Darius -- please notice I didn't pick on your Cobain choice -- I actually do think he's quite a good guitarist. Great? Debatable. But he definitely knows the instrument quite well, which at least puts him in the running.