Saw this thread.
In the thread, poor is implied in a sense that it is more severe than bad. I myself would choose to replace poor with terrible. But I don't see anything implying that in dictionaries. Is that always the case—poor is worse than bad—if the two words are used under the same context?
I think that the list clearly is meant to be in order of quality, and that one is meant to infer that poor is worse than bad. Given the common usage for these two words, I don't see that they have any clear ordering between them, so the inclusion of both of them in an ordered list of this type seems a bad (or poor) choice as it can lead to ambiguous interpretation.
If anything, one might think that poor was less severe. Poor, in addition to being used to describe quality, also describes persons who are in a state of poverty. Poor people can also be good and worthy of praise and sympathy, whereas bad people are always just bad.
Nothing is implied. No need to draw inappropriate inferences.
The list is not entirely in the order of quality.
In this context, poor does mean 'poor' as usual. It is not intended to mean 'worse than bad' at all.
Sometimes, for statistical or other reasons, certain heads need to be placed separately at the bottom of the list, and that's what is happening here. Think NOTA ('None of the Above'), it's a rather different case, but it's similarly always the last in the list.
