I tried reading as much as I could from the above posts, but seeing the hour it's kinda tough so I'll just list all the things I have in my head right now (and hopefully I'll re-organize my thoughts if necessary later on)
Let me start by saying this: the Q from QAT has been missing as of late (couple years?), and that's my main concern here. Before you start going on a tangent about it tho, let me clarify...
As everyone would agree, quality IS subjective and no one can do anything about it. And when you can't define that subjectivity through "objective metrics", you make it yourself. At least that's what I believe.
I honeslty had my fill of people saying and doing certain things just because they want to be "edgy" or simply piss off others on purpose (me included, someone could say) just because you can do whatever you want in the current ranking system (you just need two BNs to get your stuff ranked, amirite boiiis??). This is the result of, and please don't take it bad, bad leadership imo... or rather, non-existing leadership.
While being in the wrong is not the best of feelings, not knowing whether I am or not in the wrong is far more annoying I believe. Not having someone put down their foot and decide what's "good" is what brought us to the current situation and that's also why everyone with a little of influence in the community is trying to make their own values be the universal ones for everyone, hence why we get to the point where A doesn't stand B's mapping, B doesn't stand C's mapping and so on so forth...
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Second point I wanted to make is about the lack of information going around in the community.
It's almost hilarious how we've passed ten years since this game has started circulating and wherever I look around I see, sorry again for the strong words, ignorant mappers and modders who give their own interpretations to what is what, without actually having studied them (so to speak) or tried understanding what others mean by those same words.
Now, don't get me wrong, different interpretations are the best thing that could happen in a creative environment like this, but the problem lies in the fundations.
Guides and tips of every sort are lying around the forum (please notice: they have some logic that explains why X is good and why Y is not for certain situatiosn), someone even took their time to list most of them in some threads, and yet people nowadays watch a couple of videos on YouTube and believe they know it all just because they can easily emulate a couple of random jumps they saw on a ranked map a week ago... Is that quality?
I may sound like a broken disk for those who know my theories, but you need some logic to what you do: it has happened way too often that I ask "how come this pattern is like this?" to mappers and they either avoid the question or simply never actually answer because, let's be honest, the actual answer is that they didn't think twice about it.
On a side note, the only beam of hope I had (the mentorship) quickly became what I feared, but that's for another topic.
Again, might not be the most refined way to put it, but that's the gist of it.
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Last point worth mentioning, which is not even that long, is: ranking is a privilege, not a right.
This might come off strange for newer mappers, but I'd like to remind you that "ranked" is the section considered as """official""" by the game, hence why we have leaderboards on those maps.
The thought of having every and each map respecting the Ranking Criteria in such section just doesn't make sense to me when there's clearly an over-abundance of looking-alike maps (which are not that good to begin with by my standards, but let's skip this part)
To sum it up and actually suggest solutions to all of this...
Being the lack of education on the mapper's/modder's side and lack of leadership on the QAT's side the core issues, I'd rather prefer seeing a) a stronger decision making for the QAT about what is good and what is bad and b) actually make a reference, subjective as it may be, for all the people who want to approach mapping and modding altogether.
Not so long ago, while still in the mentorship program, I thought of writing a small "book" myself where I could put together all my thoughts and ideas about mapping in a simple and organized manner, so as to make new mappers see the logic behind what I do and want to see done. Of course, such book WAS going to be subjective and I don't think that's a problem.
What IS a problem, instead, is that there are too few people that could be able to do such a thing: explain their own logic. As I said, it's hard to come across someone who clearly justifies what they did in their map, even less put it down neatly into an organized book. (still not impossible to do though, right?)
Imo the current system is not at fault. The fault is with the current mentality about mapping altogether and no one trying to stir it into the right direction.
If a change has to happen, I'd rather have the old one where a MAT nominates and a BAT qualifies something instead: it's tedious, it's slow and it's difficult to get through, but at least the obstacles could discourage those who just want to rank a bunch of boring maps, hopefully, as well as give more time to opinions to arise where we need them (pretty sure this was brought up somewhere recently but can't remember).
Of course, all of this implies that the "BAT" (aka QAT) is actually made of people with similar ideologies when it comes to mapping: having too many heads (opinions) around is what I call anarchy, if you allow me...
Just nominate a damn dictator already please