Thanks for the feedback, I agree about making ratings more useful. The best I can say is that I have a branch reworking how they work, but I don't know when I'll be done! I definitely agree that rating text increase the confidence someone has about buying something, and could go along way towards getting more people to buy things on itch.io.
My current idea is to treat each rating like it's own comment thread, so developers can respond. Another idea I have is letting ratings embed into the comment thread like they are comments, but with info about the rating.