Value for your time and quality of experience is pretty much the only metric to consider.
I really don’t know why you’re arguing. Would you pick Saints Row over the much cheaper Sifu? Which one is a better use of your time?
The point is that "quality of experience" isn't just about gameplay. I really should've stressed that when I did the price-point swap on Vampire Survivors and Elden Ring, I wanted people to actually imagine how these games would look and feel if their development budgets were swapped also.
The key being that
some game ideas benefit more than others from a high quality presentation. So you can't just say that spending many times more money and man-hours "improving" a thing materially/technically is going to increase its entertainment value, but conversely you can't argue stripping down to a simpler retro-style from AAA isn't going to lessen the experience of a particular game. It really depends what the title is trying to do, and where the appeal is at.
What I'm saying is that (for comparison's sake) I feel its better and more representative not to try and rank every sort of game together. Keep them separate because we're not gaining any insight from comparing them directly.
An oil painting and a TV show can both be accurately described as pieces of contemporary commercial art, but we don't pit them against each other in a contest to see which is the "work of the year"! Not because one is definitively more "valuable" than the other, but because both have value in their own way and we gain nothing of substance from the comparison.
In the example I just gave which is (what you described as) a "better use of your time"?
I'm just making the argument that maybe we should re-calibrate from
game of the year to
games of the year, and avoid munging everything into a monolithic stack because all it does is devalue everything on it by its arbitraryness and lack of cohesive metrics.