eie, I don't really understand why you are so focused on seperating the awards and comments.
It's up to anybody whether he wants to give detailed feedback or just add a smiley in the award comment.
Chances that you give feedback are higher when you have to write something (as it is now) than if you have the chance to just click the award button.
Someone who wants to give an award and feedback can do this in the award box. Someone who wants to give feedback but no award can do it in the comment box. Nobody will give more or detailed feedback just because you seperate awards from feedback.
What's the problem about awards with just a smiley? What's worse about it than just seeing the number of awards raising? This only makes any differene if you want to have anonymous awards. And that would be totally useless.
As I said before and some others as well agreed, quality is in the eye of the beholder, thus a rating system as indicator for botw is not useful on mx. It makes sense on a server, not on mx.
You're right, awards are not rating the track, they show how many appreciate the track, thus the track that got appreciated by most players deserves to be on top.
The interest of a rating system is also it's downside at the same time.
When an unknown author gets into the botw with just one or a few top votes, it's fine for the author. He gets the chance to get recognition. Thats fine.
There are several problems though.
At least as much as some authors use their friends to award their tracks they will use their friends to give top ratings.
What's the result?
1.
The botw will be full of 5 star tracks. There will be no difference. The first 20, maybe 40, maybe 50 tracks will have a rating of 5. In fact, I foresee only new tracks in the botw with 1-5 ratings.
The more votes a track gets the more it will become 'average', something between 2 and 4. So while a track gets more votes it will go down in the top list.
2.
Because of friendly votes the botw will be full of shit tracks that just got friendly votes.
Of course it will be put into perspective with more votes but they got into the botw in the first place and what the player gets is a top-list full of shit.
So the botw will be of no reliance.
Now if you regulate this by letting the votes count only after a certain number of votes then you have changed nothing - you have the same problem that you want to get rid of - the unknown authors will not get enough votes to get into the botw.
That's why a botw based on the rating makes no sense.