This is assuming of course that the person or team doing the review are being subjective regarding the elements on which the games are rated and not rating on what they like and do not like.
Opinions have no place in industry reviews.
It seems like ent is taking your use of the word "perfection" as a concrete term or something.
"To rate a game anything over 9/10 is to say it's close to perfection" to me means something different than "To rate a game anything over 9/10 means it's near-perfection."
Am I getting at the right thing here or am I making unnecessary connections?
To me, rating a game 10/10 is saying there is nothing that can be made better or improved upon (relative to industry standards for elements like graphics etc). Therefore they are basically saying it's as perfect as it can be. So anything over 9/10 for me is saying near perfection, close to perfection, or however you want to word it.
For my money, if a game has obvious bugs like Skyrim has been shown to have, it should be capped at a 9 because things like that are a demonstration of lazyness on behalf of the testing team. I know they want to release Skyrim in time for Christmas rush and close to COD to compete with sales, but bugs like that should really have been a priority, especially since they were a constant annoyance in the previous games.