I remember someone writing a rant against having the list in firmware and managed automatically by the drive. If the list was on the host side, your software could route around the bad sectors and minimize the total amount of seek time during a program run. But with the drive managing bad sector redirection, you could never predict read latency since any read could get re-routed to a spare sector by the drive, adding latency outside your control. Everything still became automatic though.

You could buy disk packs with no bad sectors back then if you wanted that ("bit error free"). They cost extra but the premium wasn't all that high. Of course they could still develop bad sectors later.