Yearly reviews

I try really hard to not bring the office, or work in general, into and onto, this blog. I really do. In my experience, people who bitch about their jobs all the time are a bit of a psychological drag, so I strive to not become one.
Today is the exception to my rule though. Because it's that time of year again: the yearly review. My company has a nifty and fun-sounding acronym to represent it, but as in every office building, it comes out to be the same thing -- a painful 30 to 90 minutes in January, and a 30-minute mini-review in July.
I appreciate that they are a necessity in the corporate world, and that companies like to know how an employee is progressing, but the review, in any form, sucks. And really, no matter how the review itself goes down, one always leaves the manager's office feeling a bit battered and bruised.
In the several companies in which I've had to deal with the yearly review, I've had a couple bad experiences (one in particular from an editor who didn't seem to know what they were doing and how to conduct the review, and I went home crying), and a few not-so-bad experiences (one never, ever has a good review, since it's every manager's job to find something that you're not doing exactly right). The more recent reviews haven't sent me home crying, but the general consensus that no matter how good your review, you won't get a larger raise than the company average, is enough to make any employee whine and wipe away a tear.
The best year ever was in the last office, where it was so small that we didn't even conduct the yearly review. We all sat so close together that everyone knew what they were doing, what they could do better, and how to do it.
I believe the yearly review to be more of a morale-crusher than anything. How do you justify the last year of doing it all just as you should, but then being told that it wasn't exactly as they expected? How do you approach the next year knowing that the best work you'd done last year still wasn't good enough? How do you appreciate knowing that even should you excel in every way beyond your set objectives, that you won't be getting any more money for it? How do you volunteer for more exceptional ideas and duties beyond your own job description when you know that your responsibilities will end up increasing during the year anyway?
When I'm Queen of the World, I will remember this, and one of my first acts will be to abolish yearly reviews.