Not the person you replied to, but I imagine less gameable signals than stars would make sense. Download count, default installs in multiple distros, industrial use cases in the cloud all come to mind.
Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)
The details of how we're thinking about this are in:
https://github.com/osendowment/model
Happy to have you join us there to iterate on the model. We do prioritize input from paid-up members ofc. ;^)