Changing the most played maps to Spotlights could be bad idea imo, because this have an human factor: a little group of people choose them, so they could be pressured (not a nice situation).
If we want to replace it with another list, the first question is:
What was the original purpose of the Most played maps.
When the community was small and the amount of maps and new players was growing, the list helped them to look the most popular maps (aka: Bad Apple or Pika girl or Kokou no sousei), but is that our necessity to find the most popular maps?, I think new players could find them easily nowadays. In fact, they usually find them in multiplayer or Tillerino.
Without a clear purpose, any discussion is just pointless.
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Edit: ups, I forgot to say: I do not play those maps because they does not change closeToNever and what I usually want to play are old maps, or maps from mappers I like, or new maps from cool songs, or maps that someone recommended to me, or maps with edgy stats (AR7~8, CS5+, OD9+ etc), and maps without deadly streams lol
Edit2: If the purpose is to show the most enjoyable maps, showing the maps with more favs the last week, could be more interesting.
select * from beatmap where date > now() - interval 1 week order by fav limit 5;