When I look at reviews for products, I find three problems that make it impossible to trust many reviews.
1) Somewhere along the line, a three-star "average" turned into a three-star "you suck" with five star minimum. I'm not sure when this happened, but it's there. Companies on sites like E-Bay and Amazon get really upset when someone gives them anything less than five star; I've seen reports of people being contacted by companies to find out what they did so terribly wrong that they only got three or four stars.
While I can't account for E-Bay nor Amazon (I never look at their reviews because I never buy products through those platforms), however, looking at RPG review sites and sites like RPGNow or Paizo - I basically disagree with your point of view - on this point, specifically.
While some reviewers use a 10 scale, most of the sites I visit feature reviews based on a 5 scale.
Here is the latest review of my most recently released product, and to my disappointment, it's a 3/5 rated review. If you read the review you will note that Endzeitgeist does not give the implication that this product is a 3 star (you suck) rating, rather it speaks rather highly of many of the aspects of a good publication. His expectations were a bit different than my intentions in the product. Where I didn't want to go 'over the top', End took it as being somewhat bland - a difference of opinion.
As stated above, I take reviews seriously and am looking at how I can improve the product based on points in his review, however, I am hip deep in the development of the next product,
Way of the Samurai, which is a similar faction book. As in improvement in the upcoming product versus the yakuza book, we have additional designers working on the class archetypes for more creativity and varying points of view - this should make Samurai a better product than Yakuza.
I plan to make updates to
Way of the Yakuza, but that won't happen until after the release of
Way of the Samurai, but I will try to fix it based on this review.
Link to the
Way of the Yakuza review by Endzeitgeist to prove my point.