Well, the Booker Prize is kinda hit and miss. In film, the Oscars are generally 'miss', (though the aged Academy members taking their grandkids to the mall multiplex is hardly what I would call "highly skilled and respected experts", then months later voting, under duress, maybe for a film they've seen)
> I... personally don't understand why people even try to automate making better recommendation engines
It's because
* our detailed like-history contains a lot of specific information about our tastes
* highly rated books, highly reviewed books, in our favourite genres can be very poor
* (many) others' book histories, if they overlap partially with ours, contain associated information that can be utilized.
The first of Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting" books, the prequel "Skagboys", has that factory as a core component of a few of its story lines. I though Skagboys was at least as good as Trainspotting, and I'm glad I read it first.