First off, forgive me if I'm double posting here.  I have no way to searching the forum.

The creativity of what is being shared here is impressive.  I would like to be able to read the ratings left by other users a bit easier.  I'm sure they're accessible somewhere other than the Feed page.  Whether they are or not, it would be nice if the full rating text was displayed on the game view template somewhere.  

The rating text is probably the most important asset these developers have.  Psychologically they will always be more effective than comments.  Ratings sell.  

I would venture that you could drop the comments plugin altogether and allow others to reply to the ratings posted.  Nothing new here though, that is pretty much industry standard these days.

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.

"Ratings sell. "

I really doubt ratings have much of any effect on purchases. People generally know if they're interested in something the moment they see it, they're not combing through scores to decide what their opinion is.