Chas I appreciate people making suggestions and ratings has been a contentious issue since the site went up. We've changed the system several times to address user input and try to make it more acceptable. The problem with your idea is we can't have pieces that aren't rated for a few reasons;
1- The ratings are used for sorting, anything without a rating would be either invisible or at the end of the section.
2- Very few people leave ratings. There's a good probability under your idea that most submissions would never get rated.
So maybe a better idea would be to just have an admin rating and no user ratings. Or maybe have two rating categories, site rating and user rating (like Deskmod does)
Personally I don't care for ratings either but I don't know of any skins site that doesn't have them. When you have a huge database of individual works it's a necessity.
