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Something which is bugging me and is fairly inconsequential, but I want to see what others' opinions are on it:

I look at the gallery almost every day for eye candy (also for conversions and paint schemes that I end up wanting to copy the hell out of). Quite often I'm irritated by complaints from other members, (occasionally even the original poster) along the lines of "the ratings don't do the model justice", "I can't believe that model only has an 7 average score", "What the hell, this was a competition winner, you guys only gave it an 8" etc

Now complications of poor photography aside, given that the scales are from 1 to 10, my understanding is that a 6 for painting or coolness indicates you think the quality is slightly above average. By that logic:
7 is good, unusual
8 excellent, rare
9 outstanding, novel
10 is reserved for one of the best or unique things you've ever seen.

i.e. An 8 or 8.5 is a score that a painting competition winner should not be disappointed by, or complaining about. If anyone has a different view on this, please elaborate.

EDIT: I know that the ratings are uttterly subjective, and can also be skewed by the owner's reputation on the forums, what I'm concerned with here is folks understanding of the rating scale itself

Yeah - I can totally agree with you. I can only add that standard tabletop - colors + shade, without highlights, painted properly is 5 at my scale

Because not everyone has the same idea of what the 1-10 scale actually means. Some people think anything below a 7 is like a 70% in school, or a C for most of us in America. Which is really bad. An 8.0 would be a "B", or "Good", and a 9.0 would be an "A", or excellent.

I think a lot of complaints are because of a person's perception of what is good and what isn't. You also have to consider the experience of the person judging or rating the photo in question. To a beginner, a highlighted model might get a good rating from them because they have yet to try out those techniques, whereas a golden demon winner might be very harsh due to their experience.

I agree with you on your rating system. I'm an average painter at best and I like to think that I judge things pretty fairly. A 5 for me is a 3 colours up paint job that's table ready.

I just wish more people would vote in the gallery on new stuff.

Well it all being subjective.... im not surprised at all by the complaints.

add to that various biases like the subject matter or the painter them selves i can see a lot of ratings honestly getting skewed.

id honestly be pretty happy with 5s. but would be content with 4s and 3s.

It's incredibly subjective. But it's also completely meaningless.
People are all going to rate stuff by their own arbitrary standards, and there's not really anything you can do about it. No point complaining about a rating one way or the other.

I've got some models that are pretty average, where people have gone ballistic and rated > 9.0.
Then I've got others which I think are actually fairly decent, where everyone is just like 'meh, 6'.

I don't think you can really read much useful information out of these sorts of public ratings.

I agree with OP totally, though I was not aware of the complaints as I tend to use the turbovoter. For me 5 on a scale of 0-10 is average, if your painting is really sloppy or you haven't cleaned up the model properly it gets less than 5 if its high tabletop standard 7.

Coolness I really struggle with though, it is such a subjective thing that I often struggle to give it a rating. I have seen some really nice conversions but from armies I dislike the asthetics of intensly so trying to score that I find hard. Same with stock models with stock paint jobs, a while back there was a flood of RG on the gallery the vast majority unconverted and in stock paint for me thats a coolness of 2 or so.

Tell you what really, really irritates me though is the number of people who dont vote especially when they are putting their own models up for critique. If you have the time to do that then take the time to vote on a few things!

Good reading all your thoughts on this. Having done so, I realise I'm actually a little biased myself, as I only give ratings to stuff that catches my eye i.e. I don't tend to give negative ratings, as I don't like nay-saying, and don't open those pictures in the gallery in the first place. Oh well...

Just to be stress, I realise everything is arbitrary, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc. I posted this in the hopes of enlightening perhaps a handful of the multitide of good and excellent painters/modellers that a 7 or 8 is nothing to be disappointed by, and not to EXPECT 9's and 10s (as others have pointed out, you still might get them!) unless your creations is literally one of the best things we've ever seen. Ever.

Its a good topic and one I am surprised hasn't started more of a discussion.
I likewise often just don't vote if something would either rate too low a rating or it doesn't interest me but I wonder if some sort of posted guidelines for voting might increase activity or assuage some angst? (If there is such a thing already then apologies, I have never noticed it).
Also not being much of a painter I was well chuffed to get anything above a 5 on anything I have posted, though of my 327 posted images (I guess about 100 are votable) I have had six voted on each by one person (one twice).