If you make a system that relies on the user to explain why they picked a rating, or make them pick a rating for more than just 1 aspect, I think even less people will use it than the old system... I know I barely remembered to click on the rating after I tried out an addon, and I would never have the time or patience to fill out a questionaire...
That being said, I think some type of user-driven rating system is important to have, but it needs to be trustworthy. When I first started using addons, I had no idea what I was even looking for, and it was by looking at what other people thought were addons that I built up my group of favorites. The pick of the week, and featured addons, and things like that are great, but they don't really show someone if addon x is good or not, unless it's one of the few that have been showcased.
I thought about this for awhile last night, and I came up with a possible solution. It might be overly complicated, but hopefully some of your other posters can help streamline it
First, you let each user have their own personal Rank.
Rank -1 would be for unregistered users - they can download, and read things on the site, but can't do much else.
Rank 0 is for newly registered users. They can download, read, upload their own addons, post in the forums, post comments/bug reports/feature requests, etc. They can't give ratings. Rank 0 can require a user be active for more than a certain length of time before they can rank up, like a probationary period for 1 day, or 1 week, or something like that,
Rank 1 is for users that have started to get used to the site, they can do everything above, plus they can rate addons - useing the 5-star system would probably be just fine. They can only rate a small number of addons per day: possibly 5 or 10.
Rank 2: Same as rank 1, but they can give more ratings per day.
Rank 3 users can do all of the above, they have more ratings per day, plus, they can review addons, and give them a more in-depth rating, perhaps breaking it down to categories...They only have a certain number of reviews they can do per month or week... like 10 or soemthing.
Rank 4 is the same as Rank 3, only they can give more ratings per day,and more reviews per month/week.
Rank 5 users can do all of the above, they have unlimited rating power, more reviews per month/week, plus, they can choose certain addons to be "Top Pick", or something... They can have a set number of picks they can use per week/month/whatever, and they can only use it once on any one addon. The number of times different users have picked an addon can show up next to the rank, and perhaps it can change the 'level' of the addon: 50 picks makes it silver, 100 makes it gold, 500 makes it platinum, or something like that...
There can be even more ranks, if you want, and just make them have more abilities...
Each user would then gain points that work kind of like XP - when they have enough points, they rank up. I think it should take a lot of points to increase a rank.
Some ideas for what a user gets points from:
Posting in the forum (perhaps 1 point per 10 words per post?)
1 Point each time they download an addon
1 Point for each time they rate an addon. (Other than one of their own)
10 Points for each review they write.
5 point for each Bug Report/Feature Request they add to an addon (other than their own)
1 point per star when someone rates one of their addons.
A number of points based on someone's review of one of their addons:
Basically, if there are 4 categories in the review, such as Stability, Quality, etc, and someone reviews your addon giving them 3 stars in all 4 categories, then you get 12 points from that review.
When one of your addons is featured as a pick of the week, you get some number of points... 10 or 15 or something like that.
When someone of Rank 5+ 'Picks' your addon, you get a good deal of points: 10-20.
...And I'm sure there of lots of other ways to give points.
The ultimate idea here is that each user can have a personal rating, their rank, which should reflect how active they are in the community. It's not completly protected from corruption... but by limiting the power users have, hopefully people will say to themselves: "I only get to rate X addons, I should rate the ones I really like"...
So, I'm sure there are a lot of flaws in my idea... please pick it apart, and let me know what you think...