Actually I never thought about this problem this way, but it seems like in an abstract way the difference between the password and the revocation lists is that

Actually I never thought about this problem this way, but it seems like in an abstract way the difference between the password and the revocation lists is that of the size of the set: What is larger, the set of all passwords, or the set of all revoked users? In most cases the set of all revoked users would be multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the set of of all passwords. Thanks for writing this message, it made it click for me for some reason.