Buffakill, your arguments in this matter would be quite good ones, if people in general acted in a rational manner and in the interests of the many.
Thus, they are woefully unsuited to dealing with reality.
If people see that a realm is rated as "boring", 9 times out of 10, they will just skip it.
If people know that their rating of how boring their realm is will be known by people looking at their realm, 9 times out of 10, they will just rate it as "5 out of 5 stars, super-fun!" regardless of the truth.
If a larger number of players compared to other realms is content to rate it 5, fine. It's a subjective response survey: trying to approximate objectivity is not only probably not possible, but actually damages the point of the survey.
Most players will probably go with whatever the default setting is. IMHO, default should be set at 3/5, though I could see reasons to set it at 2/5 or 1/5. Many players will, as you say, just go with the team and bmp it to the max. But there's no reason to honk that an "objectively boring realm" will make such team participation MORE likely than in "objectively exciting realm." Indeed, probably the exciting realm has a slightly smaller share of players who are engaged, and a slightly lower share of players willing to give the realm a flunking score.
And ill repeat: if there's a realm we objectively think is dull, but it subjectively isn't rated that way, is hat really our problem? I suspect players probably sort themselves fairly well so that this tool will have limited usefulness across realms, but significant usefulness across times.
Had a longer bit about longitudinal vs. cross-sectional usefulness of data. Suspect 1st much more useful than 2nd due to self selection on tastes and playing style by realm, but on mobile now so don't want to peck and peck away typing the whole bit.
