Yet.. perhaps a bit more of the blame would need to go to the
  *producer* of the bad data, depending on the maturity of the
  processor or the outputer.

  At higher levels of maturity or expertise, more and more of the
  "blame" could go to the processing/outputting system itself, as,
  "it should've known better" as it were. Yes, and while the
  domino effect is often real [the culprit could be a little batch
  file nobody notices that parses data slightly wrong, or
  something akin to a rounding error] OR it could be something
  nearly impossible to fully determine - timing issues with
  different databases sharing information but updating at
  different times]... do you blame the computer clocks and the
  Network Time Protocol?