People are subjective, too, though, aren't we? As are games.

totally agree with that. hence the world resorted in my previous post. marketing a game is always a challenge though as you have to compete against people that by default have more influence than you. 

lets go over a worst case scenario. 

your game is submitted  somewhere in the middle of the submission order so searching with filter option  submission order and recently submitted are both equally worthless when trying to find you game. lets say the game's name starts with Z so an alphabetical search would put it last, lets assume the cover is a screen shot of the game with some text over it as with most of my games, as its a low effort option and can be done in a short time span.  (if you submit your game minutes before the jam ends like i always seem to  do, you probably don't have the time to do a cover ).

lucky for us itch.io has a search term for popular, problem is people need to find it click on it. and with the poor placement of our game in the other search fields the likelihood of coming across it is not looking great.  

so, doing nothing to market our game, unless its a true gem of a game and people go mad and tell all there friends and post on social media and do all the marketing work for you(which is highly unlikely unless its a AAA game from a known studio), will probably mean no one gets to see it.  

so a more direct approach in order to get more people clicking on your game is to spread out links. the more chances of people coming across a link to your game the more people will click on it.  so in order to spread you games you need to find places to comment or post  about your game. but people don't like it when your going onto there game page and trying to draw some of the viewers away with a link to your own game. 

so I've concluded the best solution to this problem is to show that you know what you are talking about when it comes to game development, through critique and praise as well as helpful comments that they could use to improve there game, and then hope that after you've gone through all that effort they are kind enough to try out your game, a click would boost your position is the popular search term making it more and more likely to get viewed.  

a rating system should allow for more search tags to be applied to the games. ( for example  "platformer" and then that gets its own ranking system based on how good of a platformer it is. you could use the tags already  on the games to filter which rating tags it would use, so a guitar hero clone wouldn't be rated as a platformer) allowing people to search for and therefore play games that they would enjoy. but i think they fear is that people would only play the highest ranking games and the everyone else has to fight for positions. which isn't encouraging for new comers or people that are still learning the ropes.