Second game jam for me. First solo. I was amazed by how hard it was to get people playing my downloadable game. The middle of last week I was sitting at around 10 ratings and was visiting web based games that were already in the triple digits.
I don't see R4R posts quite the same way as you. From my perspective, it's about the only way people can market their game on here. In fact, that's the only way I have been able to get any ratings at all. I have not posted an R4R thread, but I have been replying to them all day, every day for the past six days and have only got a whopping 32 ratings for my effort. That said, I have been responding primarily to others with downloadable games that are in the same boat as myself because they are the only ones willing to play mine. At this time, I have rated 67 games. That's about two ratings given for each one received. I feel confident that I would have zero ratings if not for these threads.
Maybe some of these issues can be resolved by capping the number of ratings you can get? Once you hit that arbitrary number, your game is hidden or otherwise buried so others can get in the spotlight. Will that solve the problem? By itself, probably not.
In the other jam I was a part of, you were assigned a queue of ten games that you had to play through before you could try anything else. That could help as long as your game gets on enough queues. I would also suggest that the number of games you have to play would be based on the number of submissions.
Maybe the jam needs to be split into categories? Web, downloadable, and mobile and you compete/rate in the category that you submit.
I understand your frustration. I'm going to head off to play Hellbakers. Feel free to play and rate my downloadable game. ;)