Well, bumping this because it came up in a thread with a bad OP that has now been moved to the wasteland.
As far as I know Beatmap Nominators aren't urged to look at maps with high SP over maps with low SP unlike BATs were.
This means that Star Priority(SP) is virtually useless once it is high enough to be considered for a bubble(12+) due to the reasons pointed out by Sonnyc:
Star priority doesn't always indicate the quality of a beatmap.
If SP isn't a major thing for anyone right now the SP-system should be changed so it becomes useful for people again.
The most efficient way to get your maps high SP right now is to receive mods of any quality: On top of SP you also get mods so your map potentially improves while raising starpriority.
A different way is modding other people's maps and throwing Kudosu at your map. This is completely inefficient as high SP won't make people notice your map necessarily due to its vanished meaning and you use a lot of time on other maps you could spend on your own.
That's why the M4M scene is booming right now. You gain a mod of whatever quality, you do a mod yourself and you get SP for both making this a very efficient to farm SP and map improvement - mostly because it is hard to find modders due to the very low incentive to mod other people's maps.
Sonnyc's approach tries to make SP usable for BNs by adding some hurdle for the passive SP gain of mappers:
If their map is bad it will gain no SP for being modded, meaning that the mapper either has to make the map good or put in effort to earn himself some Kudosu. The incentive to make the own map good is bigger in this case as well provided that the mapper is capable of doing so.
The main problem I see is the lack of quality awareness within the mapping community. Many people who aren't very familiar with mapping do small mods - often with questionable quality - and are already very happy with the map they're modding. Such people would throw SP even if the map wasn't good at the price of the map not even improving by much causing Case 3 to occur anyway - at a smaller scale but I don't believe that it wouldn't occur.
That being said it would still be a lot better than what we got right now, no doubts.
Personally I would prefer it if SP by Kudosu and SP by mods would get separated completely:
SP by Kudosu shows how much interest the community has in the mapset regardless of its actual quality. This could be increased a lot by active modders.
SP by Mods would show how much attention the mapset got so far.
In my opinion the system should encourage modding most of all things and also represent this by sorting Pending/WIP maps either via SP by Kudosu or by a correlation between SP by Kudosu and SP by Mods.
The bigger the difference between SP by Kudosu and SP by Mods is the higher the value of the map would be and the higher it would be shown.
A map with 47 SP by Kudosu and 23 SP by Mods could have an effective priority value of 24. (simple substraction is probably not the best idea)
Maps the community has a lot of interest in(indicated by high KD count) would be shown at the very top and slowly decrease the closer the SP by Mods gets to the SP by Kudosu. This would also encourage qualitymodding as an increase of Mod-SP would mean a loss of effective priority: Short mods of low quality would often end up without a KD reward.
There would also be the possibility of awarding more Kudosu to people who mod maps with a high effective priority to make modding these more attractive - it would have to be regulated in a smart way to prevent KD-Inflation though. Maps with negative priority could be made less attractive from a certain value downwards. SP by Mods would be a good indicator for BNs to see how many quality mods a mapset received.
Probably no use thanks to osu!next but this topic needs attention and I couldn't really let it rest by that thread moving to the wasteland(or getting deleted).
Star priority doesn't always indicate the quality of a beatmap.