4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss

How is that not inflated? For my personal ratings, a three is something I’d be happy to eat every day. A five is close to unattainable. It’s basically centered on 2.5 with something like a tapered normal distribution. It’s tedious mapping out so I’m not lowering ratings for good places so I don’t rate anymore.

But getting past me being difficult, you can’t even rate 4.5 can you? Isn’t that information being lost when the way people rate is basically 5 for thumb up and every other number is a thumb down?

You’re right about it being useful to look at relative ratings, I just wouldn’t label that as really accurate.

It’s a separate issue but you brought up categories. I never loved rating in a situation like on Airbnb where one place might be a deliberately expensive penthouse and another might be deliberately a cheap shared room in the wilderness, especially with something like a “cleanliness” rating