Hey I'm gonna give some perspective from the organisers side here.
So first of all, this jam has an insane amount of participants compared to our other jams. Our other jams were also big, but this jam has about 3(!) times the participant count of the previous jam. The submission count didn't grow as much, but still over doubled compared to the last time.
This means there are a lot of new problems surfacing. For example, the dedicated jam channel on the server has been pure link spam for the first day or two. In the past, we didn't have to do any kind of separation for promotion of games and discussion, while it was definitely required this time. Is that just because of the increased amount of participants? Or maybe the mindset of the participants? No clue, we don't have a way to find out either.
On the Discord server, we are easily able to solve this. We are familiar with the moderation tools and able to customize quite a bit. We have our own bot and if it's really needed, we can make the bot help us with keeping the channels clean and orderly.
The itch.io community tab is an entirely different beast. I think I can speak for all organisers here when I say that we have almost no experience using them and that's not even talking about the moderation features. Learning to use a new set of moderation tools while everything is already a giant mess (yes I admit, the community tab is currently a disaster) is a bit of pressure and takes time. It's currently summer break for most of the staff members so some have trips planned, volunteering work, or other activities during the day. For me, after working on the jam for a week, energy levels are definitely low and not really being recharged with the heatwave going on. This also has it's effect on how we are moderating the community tab, for example.
Personally, I don't have a problem with rate 4 rate being a thing. I think it's good to encourage people to play eachothers games and give feedback. I do agree with the concerns you bring up regarding people just rating 1 star without even downloading/launching the game, just to comment "good game rate mine too thanks".
(This next bit is what I believe to be true, but if Leafo is reading this he can maybe give a little better explanation as he knows how it works behind the scenes..)
The itch rating system has a weighted rating, which means that the ratings of people that just spam 1 star on everyone will be counted less than the rating of a person that gives honest ratings to everyone. This should at least take care of part of this problem.
There is still the problem of people just commenting on games saying "nice game". There is no way for us to block this kind of behaviour. There are too many ratings and comments coming in on a daily basis to moderate all of them. There is also no way for us to know when the comment is a genuine one. Maybe the person commenting really thought it was the best game they ever played and they don't have any criticism, maybe it's just a rate farming spammer. Of course we can check the history of the user, but that's another action we would have to take per rating, consuming more of our already limited time...
Then there is the rating queue idea. GMTK jam had a rating queue where you first had to play x amount of games from your queue, before you were able to rate anyone. This is something we also wanted to do for our jam, but I think something went wrong in the backend of itch (it's not a released feature yet, we had contact with itch to see if they could set it up for us and it should've been set up correctly). We don't want to keep people locked to their queue completely, because I know that I want to rate the games from my friends freely. If I would have to find them by pure luck... That would be a disaster! It would of course help with people like Dani getting insane amounts of ratings, just because they are a content creator. I have considered talking to him to see if he would be ok with not being able to win because it's not fair with his community behind him, but at the same time it's not fair to do that either! If he does win in all categories (or any category), we'll see how we can handle it. Especially because there are no prizes on the line, it's a lot easier to just also mention the 2nd place games too.
I am definitely going to bring up some points about the community tab (and post-jam community in general) in the post-jam organisers reflection chat, so we can hopefully make the experience a better one next time. I will also discuss if we should block the rate 4 rate threads completely and start cracking down on them more during this jam, or if we see another solution.
I think I have talked about the most important issues brought up in here, let me know if I missed any.
TL;DR: We don't know how itch community works, time is valuable and limited, we are going to reflect on the current state of the rating period and hopefully improve for next time.