I see the rating system as a way to compare my own work against the others. Of course, some smartass might spoil the rating just for fun, but I can easily ignore this when the comments are not serious or missing. Comments of honourable members are more important than the rating. If I just want comments, I disable the rating. So I think, the mechanism is perfect as it is. I, too, rarely give a 5. I think it belongs only to absolutely stunning pictures which immediately jump at my eye, for whatever reason there may be. I'm always glad when somebody gives my work a 4. If it's a 5, I feel very honoured. But it's not my goal to get a clean 5.0 average for an image. As tlaubach stated, there's a lot of crap in the "best ratings", so that's not the criterium for me. What's a bit more important to me is the number of viewings, though I don't quite get the strange schemes behind the viewer's behaviour... Sometimes a quick render gets over 300 viewings, whereas a hard work masterpiece doesn't make it over 100. I wonder if this depends on the weekday when you post it, the amount of flesh in the thumbnail ;-) or the phase of the moon, or whatever? Strange...