I appreciate your understanding. And your phrasing, you nailed it.
Candidly, while nigh impossible to see things from the eyes of Ancient Greeks, I think the main take away (which may explain my incorrect recollection, as a shortcut/oversimplification) is that their view of democracy accepted 'sentiment' as valid motive, as valid 'reason' for principle and action. Part of such sentiment was suspicion, the sense of "feels right / wrong". It wasn't naive or blind, nor die-hard objective or quantified; the practice of democracy had to feel 'right', ad hoc. (I've read, in other contexts, accounts of suspicion against greed and wealth from this time very comparable to what we hear today; on a number of topics for that matter, like immigration or cultural identity, the words and perceptions of every day people are strikingly similar.)
It seems that human judgment was deemed 'sacred' or 'quintessential' enough for Ancient Greeks that they let it flow freely, though in some specific moments and places, carefully constrained within the whole political framework —remember that the point was less excellence thereof than survival of all.
Also interesting is the 'de-escalating' approach, ostracism has a negative outcome: not to 'empower' the good guys but rather to 'disable' the bad ones. Here lies a very important principle of their democracy: never give too much power to anyone, especially the ones you 'like' (it always backfires against democracy, as it did eventually in the Roman experiment a couple centuries later). Seek the minimum amount of global power required to fulfill the mission, less is more, lower is better. Concentration of power is a threat to the distribution ideal sought by democracy.
Whatever we think of it, the democratic 'experiment' back then lasted some 200 years, under these principles, and I think it's well worth studying if our current regimes are to become more 'direct' in the hyper-connected environment we now find ourselves in.