Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film.
Personally I disregard both RT and published reviews (I've never found a reviewer who aligns with me) and go off word-of-mouth from my circle of friends and family. But I think that doesn't work for everybody either.
Definitely agree with what you're saying, though I guess I'm saying you don't need to limit yourself to a particular subset of reviewers.
And it's increasingly less useful given the way streaming services have changed movie releases.
I do this, but their opinion isn't a perfect indicator of what my opinion will be, and it's useful to know if their belief this time around is aligned with general consensus or an outlier.
Read the whole message before jumping on it. The last paragraph, which most people would take to be the conclusion, was:
Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film.
RT & MC, although flawed, are superior metrics for watchability of a movie to box office totals. The existence of another, less useful metric (which isn't free from biases or opportunities for manipulation) has no probative value on whether one should use RT.
And, then, you mock others and break the site guidelines in the cousin thread.