This is a subject I've tried to write about a few times and often found myself getting too into the weeds and losing the main thrust of my point of view. There are so many subjective opinions and thoughts that can creep in when addressing the point of Dave Meltzer's star ratings and they aren't necessary for the main point about why his star ratings mean less now than ever. A lot of criticism of Meltzer's ratings can be distilled to the point that his opinion should never have been treated as a monolith of what a great match is. Whether you disagree with him or not the reason critique of other media is more healthy is that there are a large amount of critics who you can look to find a similar view of movies or tv as you to follow. Wrestling has had other voices, but none have lasted as long or gained the notoriety of Meltzer. A lot of people like to pain Meltzer's opinions losing their relevance when he broke the five star scale, which I agree is bad, but the biggest issue that changed was how easy it was for everybody to watch wrestling from around the world.
A big reason that Meltzer's ratings mattered originally was that it let tape traders know what they should be looking to acquire. Now that watching footage from Japan, Mexico, or Europe is as simple as subscribing to a service or buying and downloading a show online a lot of people can watch wrestling from around the world and there isn't as much of a barrier between people and quality wrestling. This has created a larger amount of people who rate wrestling matches from foreign and indie companies although none of them have even approached Meltzer's level of ubiquity it is helping to create a more healthy argument for match ratings when there is not a decisive voice on a match's quality. There seems to be a lot of momentum for creating a more diverse set of voices talking about wrestling which I think is a positive for the wrestling community.
Meltzer definitely hurt his ratings when he broke the five star scale with his rating for Omega vs Okada at WrestleKingdom 11. You don't see professional movie critics decide that a movie is so good it can no longer be contained within the five or four star scale they use. That is combined with the increased amount of five star matches that Meltzer has handed out which seems like an over corrected from not giving out enough of them in the past, but he has also said he changed how he views and rates matches, which is a legitimate thing to do, but not great when your ratings are held as the standard for classic matches. This speaks to a larger problem with Meltzer being both the main journalist and critic for wrestling, and then later adding mixed martial arts as well. Journalism and Critiquing are very different skills and being good at one doesn't make you good at the other and Meltzer just got accepted as both because he was the only voice that had a national presence. The fact that his opinion became so big was that it seemed to enshrine a voice that liked a particular form of wrestling as to what would earn five stars. An interesting aspect to that was there were vocal contingents complaining about Meltzer not rating enough WWE matches at five stars, but never finding somebody who did rate those matches highly to contest him.
While I've pointed out some problems with Meltzer's ratings and the fact that I don't think he's great at critiquing matches, the main takeaway shouldn't be that Meltzer sucks, but instead that he's a single voice in the wrestling ecosystem and that a healthy system should have a diverse set of opinions so people can find a reviewer that matches their tastes. I do think there is that set of voices out there right now, but I don't think any are being treated as a definitive source like Meltzer and a lot don't want to act like such a definitive source either, which makes sense given the vitriol fans deliver toward reviewers. But largely I'm just hoping the fans and industry move away from treating Meltzer's ratings as a definitive thing that means anything when he's just one guy giving his opinion.
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