There are genuinely bad tenants. There are genuinely bad landlords. The system does a poor job of filtering the two. If the system worked well, good participants from either group would have little to fear from doing business with a bad actor on the other side. The system we have-and that you described well-forces a policy choice between favoring landlords (including the bad ones) or favoring tenants (including the bad ones). It is not a fair and free market.