I've noticed this idea of sniping and sniping services essentially nulling the point of an auction.
Hardly. Sniping simply makes it a "sealed bid" auction, instead of the "going, going, gone" auction you're probably most familiar with. It doesn't null anything. High bid still wins, and that's the "point" of an auction.
Can we suggest eBay institute a system change if so where do we do that? My suggestion would be any bid placed within the last minute automatically extends the auction by 1 minute.
Congratulations on being the 10,000th person to suggest this. If eBay thought it would raise selling prices, they'd have done it in a heartbeat, because higher prices mean more fees for them. But they haven't.
This would allow the person willing to pay the most actually won the auction.
eBay's proxy bidding system already guarantees that the person willing to pay the most will win, as long as they don't nickel and dime their bid. Have you bothered to read and understand how proxy bidding works? I doubt it. If you did, I don't think you'd be suggesting this.
Can you imagine going to a live auction where the auctioneer held a stop watch and whoever blurted out the loudest in the last 2 seconds won? No of course not, why should eBay be any different.
Oh, let's see, off the top of my head:
1) In a live auction, the item can be bid on for less than a minute. On eBay, it's available for days. People have plenty of time to decide how much they're willing to pay.
2) In a live auction, everybody is sitting right in front of the auctioneer at the end of the auction. On eBay, I can win an auction even when I'm asleep if I've placed my proxy bid. I won't be at my computer in the middle of the night, or when I'm at work, or when I'm in the car, so the winning bid might be lower instead of higher. Is that what you want?
You obviously don't understand proxy bidding. Until you do, your research into "buyer trends" won't get you very far on eBay.
Theory: you understand why it should work but it doesn't
Practice: it works but you have no idea how