Outstanding. Or not.

This cheerful red-and-white specimen is the bane of my bleedin' existence, is what it is. Yes yes, I know it's really not kosher amongst us serious classical music people to approve of review magazines sticking labels on albums or - must... clutch... pearls... - giving them star ratings or marks out of 10, but when one of the things that keeps you amused is maintaining a spreadsheet that collates reviews from different sources it's useful to have a quick and easy way of knowing what the reviewer thought. So I'm all for them. But this blasted IRR Outstanding is a whole other business. If they were going for an Editor's Choice kind of thing I wouldn't mind so much, but apparently it's the reviewers themselves who slap an IRR Outstanding on their reviews.
But what exactly is the problem, Nereffid? I hear you gibber. I will tell you what the problem is. It's when Peter J. Rabinowitz reviews Stephen Hough's new Tchaikovsky concerto double album and concludes his review with the words "Highest recommendation" and doesn't give a blazing IRR Outstanding even though that by fracking definition is the highest recommendation. And when Robert Matthew-Walker calls the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra's debut release on Onyx "an absolutely outstanding disc from every point of view" and doesn't give it a fucking IRR Outstanding.
That's what the problem is, right there.