Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :) https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496
Utila? I think I ran into you on Reddit yesterday. Good to see you're also on HN. Small world (if not, then from your tweet I met Mark).
I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.
But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!
You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"
I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).
If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).
But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).