Apple fully implemented its new version specific customer reviews and ratings system last night. It was first revealed during the day yesterday, but it seems that the new system hadn't fully propagated to all of the servers until late in the evening.
The App Store now clearly displays separate ratings for the current version and overall ratings for all versions of an application. The new layout also allows users to read separate reviews for the current version as well as for all versions.
With the new system, if a developer submits a somewhat buggy 1.0 version of their application or if it lacks a certain important feature and receives multiple bad ratings, the application won't be penalized in the ratings when the issue is fixed in the next version. We don't condone buggy or featureless applications, but if a developer fixes whatever their issue was they shouldn't be penalized.
Hopefully Apple is working on fixing other issues behind the scenes as well, for example, the application review process. One step at a time. Now go rate some new versions of applications.
