It's interesting you've put this much thought behind this. Perhaps there's personal experience that contributes to these thoughts.

Also interesting how we come away from topics with different mindsets. For example, you may have heard the quote "It's easier to live the gospel 100% of the time than 99% of the time." There have been variations of that I'm sure. I don't know who originally said it. You can probably imagine the conversations that branch from that quote: We can be hard on ourselves, sin is a slippery slope, or whatever. However we rephrase that quote, I think we could probably understand the general concept it's teaching.

My perspective on the "Good, Better, Best" concept is that it's meant to be applied against the "Be 100% obedient" concept. What I mean is, you're warning of the dangers of "good, better, best" are fair. I understand what you're saying, but the "good, better, best" concept is supposed to help us understand that 90% is still good.

At this point, we approach a crossroads of conversation. "But maybe 90% is not good." Aww yes. Perhaps that's what your entire post could be reduced to. But I argue that it's not very relevant what is "good" or what is "bad". It IS relevant, long term, but short term that isn't necessary to sit and ponder. I would simply argue that it's all relative to one another. On the short term, it's best we simply progress to whatever is good.

Imagine we had a scale that went from worst - worse - bad - good - better - best. I'm basically positing that whatever is less than "best", could be labelled relatively bad. Whatever is better than "worst" is relatively good. When speaking of a broad description of morality in our lives, whatever is 3 or 4 steps ahead of us isn't always clear, so it doesn't necessarily matter what is best or perfect (short term). What matters is moving to that next step. In retrospect, we end up having a change in our hearts. But I would consider this the broad, long term perspective.

I think I agree with your post at it's core, I just don't think there's much danger to it. Because "good" could really mean bad. But at the time, we just don't know. So yes, we should always be improving. And during our improvement, we may realize that what we were doing was "bad". And maybe it wasn't really all that "bad" (worst) but it mattered that we progressed. Or to rephrase it another way, it doesn't matter that we originally consider our actions "bad" even when we know it, because it matters that we simply take the next steps forward.

Forgive my rambling.