Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced that additional complexity of STAR is worth it compared to extremely simple score voting.
Score voting (also known as range voting) is not a very good system to use in a real election because there's a huge risk that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the extremists will all give their candidate a score of 10 and everyone else 1, whereas the moderates will score their candidates, say, 7 or 8 and score the ones they don't like 3 or 4. The extremists could thus prevail despite being significantly outnumbered by modera…
Indeed, you should use whole available range. But there's still incentive to differentiate more than max/min, because otherwise you don't get any influence to choose between other candidates. For example with candidates: A-best, B-lesser evil, C-evil; instead of scoring max/0/0 it would be more reasonable to vote max/something/0. Voting system cannot give you result reflecting your preferences if you don't provide them!
Maybe another way to look at this: there's only so much influence single ballot has, and you can spend it to either push A above B/C, or A/B above C. It's a tradeoff, but score voting allows you to dial in the ratio you want. Falling back to approval is strictly less expressive.