I've refunded for a few INRs since the defect system was introduced, and thankfully haven't received a defect for any of them as yet - not a permanent one, anway.  

All but one buyer contacted me directly, and the refunds didn't trigger anything on those. I had one request opened, refunded immediately on that one (large letter, no tracking, buyer seemed to think I never sent it and it had already been 4 weeks since the purchase, so I figured further negotiation, asking to wait etc was off the table anyway). That closed off with eBay telling me it won't count against me in my seller performance rating, but I did briefly have a defect for a transaction cancellation (was there maybe 1-2 days, no other transactions had been cancelled or refunded during that time, so I assumed it was a glitch due to the request, and didn't chase it up because it disappeared so quickly).

More recently, I had someone buy something and provide an incomplete address (they gave me a street number and suburb, but no street name, the street number was quite high, so while I contacted them to request more info, I also googled to see how many streets in that suburb went up that high - unfortunately there were two, and they never replied to any of my messages, so I refunded in full, fully expecting I'd get a defect, which I did, but again it disappeared quickly.

I suspect if you refund without cancelling the transaction in normal circumstances (I didn't cancel any of mine where they contacted me directly) ebay don't get "shirty" lol, mine were low value transactions so I wore it. On the one where it was via a request, I think it might have been because I resolved it by refund straight away, no back and forth etc and it didn't go to a case. eBay also refunded my FVF on that one. o_O