Barney; As others have noted, you are more than a little obsessed with this topic and return to it in various guises as often as possible. Since my discipline is law and not psychiatry, I'll not venture any further into the reasons for this behaviour. Instead, I'll offer a few comments.
I think on balance ratings are good good for the discipline because they
draw attention to golf course architecture and help bring focus to that which various people think is both good and bad about approaches to designing, building and maintaining golf courses. The important thing to remember is that each rating is merely a collection of opinions and thus cannot be taken too seriously when considering the relative merits of individual courses. Instead they should be viewed as benchmarks for considering that which makes a course "great' or '' better" when compared to others.
Relying on market forces would be a mistake in my opinion. The market measures popularity and commercial success which are very important. But, at the risk of sounding like a snob ( and I think you know me well enoughto judge whether I am or not) that which is most popular is not necessarily that which is best. If you need a simple example, merely look to the music industry and take a look at what sells. Then ask what people will still be listening to in 1, 2 , 5 , 15, or 20 years. Which is best? The entire pupose of intelligent criticism is to try and understand that which makes any endeavor better than another, whether one is discussing the relative merits of food, art, ballplayers or golf courses.
Finally, I find your remarks about the destructive impact of this site on your ability to appreciate golf courses to be disconcerting, particularly in light of your "smartest guy in the room" and other similar threads. What you are suggesting is that the more educated you become, the less you are able to apply your own standards to analyzing courses because you have been influenced by others. I never thought I would compare you to Rousseau but it sounds like you are suggesting that you yearn to be a "noble savage" untouched by civilization when it comes to GCA. Nonsense I say. The only way education limits your ability to form opinions is if you are so weak willed and easily influenced that you are unable to apply the knowledge you have obtained and reach your own conclusions. If that is what you are suggesting then the question remains whether your uneducated and uninfluence opinion would be "better" than an educated albeit influenced evaluation. But of course we know you are stronger minded than that and are capable of making up your own mind notwithstanding the impact of ratings and the attempts by fellow GCA afficianados to influence your opinion. So what the entire thread comes down to is another series of reasons why you don't like ratings and why you are suspicious of the GCA "intelligentsia". OK, we get it and while there may be some internal inconsistencies the general theme remains the same. I respect your opinion onthis issue; I just disagree.