[xXOpkillerXx]

The only thing making rates count does is make it faster to get avrank. I am pretty confident there's nothing to argue there.

What does avrank measure ? Quite obviously, your average rank on all the songs in the game ("public" songs). It is a metric that is well known, although it is one that does not reflect skill nearly as well as the more recent metric that is your Skill Level. Avrank could've arguably benefited from the proposed change when it was the main metric of skill, as it would've made sense to provide a way for better players to climb the leaderboards faster.

That being said, there is absolutely no reason to make rates count as 1.0 scores other than, well, "I want to improve my placement on that metric faster", which is just making the game easier for nothing

Devonin argued that a good thing it does is make it not boring. And well the OP here shared concerns about avrank being boring. My opinion is that if you want to improve your avrank, you must be a completionist kind of player, because a competitive one would focus on Skill Level. Please let me know if there are any other reasons why one would focus on Avrank nowadays. So, going with the completionist idea, if you want to improve avrank but cannot bear with the tedious task that is to play all files on 1.0, then simply give up. There's not much more to it really.