There is a systems-design principle at play: once you create a higher measure for something, you tend to favor using that higher measure. With time, it ceases to be a good way to distinguish things because it becomes the new default.
This happens to me when I want to save something to read later. These days I use a read-it-later app called Matter and I have a tag for that purpose. However, once I created this tag, I started using it for many more things—I realized that if I don't tag content this way, I probably won't read it at all.
A similar pattern appears in Google Maps ratings. We've come to consider a 4.0-star restaurant as having a low rating while 4.7 is good. Then when you encounter a mediocre new place and want to rate it, you're thinking in relation to these higher numbers. Oddly, a restaurant with a 2.2 rating isn't used as a reference point, the league is 4.0-5.0.