Indeed. Luckily griefers tend to announce themselves as griefers when they are extracting salt, so they're happy to be identified. The griefer's aim is to get attention for their griefing. So when judging individually it's easy to do.PvP cannot compare to PvE in that if you ask me.
PvP requires other players to be PvP, it requires someone to attack and someone to defend from. Add that the amount of people participate in griefing and call themselves PvP'ers is something you cannot really know or judge properly because they can effectively claim anything online.
In my book for PvP to work, people need to have a nature of good sport about it, otherwise PvP can end up killing itself, and given the amount of complaint threads with low open population, that could on the surface seem to be what is happening?
PvE does ultimately not require any other players, and as such is based around game mechanics, which you cannot really blame those players for.
I say you judge individuals based on their actions and statements they make in the forum. If an explorer is being rude, that explorer is being rude. It doesn't mean explorers are rude. If a PvPer gets joy out of ruining other player's game, and boast about this on the forum, you judge that individual on getting joy out of ruining other player's games.