On the balance I consider irreversibility a negative.
I would much prefer fairness over irrevesibility.
Fairness means different things to different people under different circumstances. You can't build universal fairness into the protocol, so it is just as well that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible because there is no way you can fairly reverse a "bad" transaction using a decentralized scheme.
You could always build third party escrow systems on top of Bitcoin wherever they are required, and there are many examples of these around.