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That's funny, James.
First of all, a class III paddlers can come down a class IV rapid, even if it's over their head. To do it repeatedly, having run that certain class IV rapid several times, despite them not being a class IV paddler, might even make them have decent lines and appear to be in control. Put them on another class IV rapid and they might get in serious trouble, because they don't have the water reading skill and boat control to stay on the line. That alone doesn't support your line of thinking that it's about what level of paddler can paddle that rapid.
As for the "paddlers get tired and lose concentration in longer rapids" line of thinking, what does that say about the level of paddler? That the paddler is not yet up to paddling a certain level of white water? And yes, someone who is on control on let's say class IV, can catch the right eddies and stop to catch a breath. If you can't catch the right eddies, you have no business being there, and you should continue practicing class IV lines in class III rapids until you do get the necessary skill, instead of running something that's over your head. The idea that a rapid gets harder if you get tired and lose concentration is ludicrous. You get in worse shape, so your skill level drops, the rapid doesn't get any harder (or easier)!
The logic behind "If people weren't paddling the rapids, would there be ratings at all?" is also warped. People don't need to rate rapids to run them. The use in rating them is to give information to or to share it with others. I sometimes paddle with paddlers whose rating system is of the binary variety. The rapids they run and the ones they don't run. The big joke is that they don't change their ratings of rapids, but they will run something one day, and portage it the next, because they don't feel like running it. Does that change the rating of the rapid?
The funny thing about your example of the marathon and 100 feet is that it's about endurance, not skill. If you used that example to flat water kayaking, you'd have a point. Now, it just takes your argument's validity away, since in your view, a fat and horribly out of shape paddler could not run class IV where a healthy one could. The joke is that the best paddlers I know are the laziest ones. They don't need that much energy to run a rapid, and they actually get down a river floating more than paddling, letting the current do most of the work. The comparison between running a 100 foot class III rapid and running 100 foot pieces of a mile long class III rapid would have been a better and more accurate example. Each seperate piece is no harder than that one single piece.
Your insistence of adding the human and mental factors makes the rating scale way too subjective to be useful, because everyone can add their own subjectiveness to a score. That only makes everyone's ratings differ so much to be virtually useless in comparison. It does explain the heated debates over a certain rapid's classification. Besides being blurred by those grading a rapid too low due to their repeated experience with that rapid (running it often makes it easer, so the rating can go down, right?:-)), now there are also the ones who are out of shape rating it too high because they got tired and the ones not eating enough before who lose their concentration, not to mention the ones having found the undercut in it too threatening who add another level and finally the ones who thought it was too far from help so they added another level to it. So we end up with class VII rapids, which causes problems with the six classes of the current international scale of white water difficulty classification (and I'm all for making that scale open ended, retaining the current grading and adding new numbers on top). Sorry James, you are still far from convincing me.
The last time we had this discussion, the only link you could come up that seemed to support your impression of how the international white water difficulty ratings function, was the AW one. Since that's the exception to the rule, and an adaptation of the original that adds consequences as well, it doesn't exactly support your case.
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I make the mistake? New 
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